Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue , Los Angeles Times , and The New Republic New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A FRANK, INTELLIGENT, AND DEEPLY MOVING DEBUT MEMOIR The precocious only child of a doctor and a classical musician, Marco Roth was able to share his parents' New York. Theirs was a world that revolved around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and discussions of the latest advances in medicine―and one that ended when Marco's father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that had infected him in the early 1980s. What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, with surprising and often devastating effects. Written in the tradition of Edmund Gosse, Henry Adams, and J. R. Ackerley, The Scientists is a book that grapples with a troubled intellectual and emotional inheritance―the ways in which we learn from our parents, and then learn to see them separately from ourselves. “Riveting...Part mystery, part tragedy, part spiritual and intellectual biography. It's beautifully written and as honest as a book can be.” ― Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding “A gorgeous memoir no one will be able to put down.” ― Mary Karr, author of Lit “ The Scientists is an act of love--a circumspect, often bitter, always studious love.” ― The New York Times Book Review “An unsentimental backward glance...This slim, fierce meditation takes readers into realms where more emotional, confessional tales rarely tread.” ― Maureen Corrigan, NPR “Circuitous, elegant, and fiercely intelligent...With the wisdom of a good reader and the humility of a lost soul, Mr. Roth sorts through the mess of his past--in order to plot his escape from it.” ― The Economist “Beautifully intelligent and moving...A literary detective story and also an object lesson in the way the self can be constituted by literature.” ― Adam Kirsch, The New Republic “An exquisitely written and intensely interior book, one that eschews the contemporary memoir's penchant for epiphanies, redemption, and tidy resolutions...Extraordinary.” ― Laura Miller, Salon “This is the first intellectual autobiography by someone our age in the searching nineteenth-century tradition of Edmund Gosse or Henry Adams: the autobiography equally of a reader and of a son, grappling with an inheritance that is both intellectual and emotional--an education for our times.” ― Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review “Marco Roth's memoir is a farewell to a bygone Jewish American culture--polyglot, intellectual, Europhile, psychoanalytic--and simultaneously a renewal of that culture. It's both moving and tough-minded, a book of high intellect and deep feeling the like of which nobody else could write.” ― Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision “ The Scientists manages to recuperate for our time a certain kind of personal, idiosyncratic, private writing that moves at the speed of an actual very high intelligence. No one in our generation has written anything like this.” ― Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men “ The Scientists is...not simply a perceptive and highly literary memoir but a book about attempting to uncover the mystery of a father's life after his death, and the posthumous intimacy that forms.” ― Alexander Aciman, The Wall Street Journal “[A] beautifully sharp memoir...Marco Roth turns his analytical eye on the culturally rich milieu of his upbringing and the mode of education he received within the walls of his home... The Scientists is composed with the same analytical eye for influence that the critic has brought to the table as an editor and writer for n+1 . A less diligent memoirist might have easily restricted this meditation on retrospective reading to more defensive, sentimental territory, and Roth's acknowledgment of the uncertainty of his purpose is commendable both for its bravery and its awareness... The Scientists is still, at its most fundamental, a family romance : elegiac, rife with frustrations of desire and secrecy...Roth's prose, which has been well tuned by years of academic writing and meticulous study of literary classics, is luminous and graceful. His gift for building plot from domestic drama is similarly patent; his story is gripping, and The Scientists: A Family Romance is a burning work, alive with all the romantic potentials one would expect of a canonical classic--or, better yet, of a family life lived deeply, richly, and painfully.” ― Ryan Sheldon, Blomblog “This book is suffused with real pain...The best things in The Scientists are Mr. Roth's spiny meditations on sex and ambition and family and love and death. The sound this book makes is the sound of a keen mind on shuffle. He strongly evokes a generational sense of malaise...[ The Scientists ] lingers in the cranium.” ― Dwight Garner, The New York Times “Roth's prose evokes a calm, contemplative feel, with occasional flights of poetic fancy... The Scientists is at