Andrew Lipstein

'Andrew Lipstein's The Vegan is a meaty comedy with a bleeding heart, highly recommended for all animals who read' Joshua Cohen, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Herschel Caine is a master of the universe. His hedge fund, built on the miracle of machine learning, is inches away from systematically sapping profits from the market. His SoHo offices (shoes optional, therapy required) are ready for desperate investors to flood through the doors. But on May 12, his mind is elsewhere-at his Cobble Hill townhouse and the dinner party designed to impress his flawless neighbors. When the soiree falters, Herschel concocts a prank that goes horrifically awry, plunging him into a tailspin of guilt and regret. As Herschel's perfect world starts to slip away, he clings to the moral clarity he finds in the last place he'd expect: a sudden connection with his neighbor's dog. A wildly inventive, reality-bending trip, The Vegan holds a mirror up to its reader and poses a question only a hedge fund manager could: is purity a convertible asset? The more Herschel disavows his original sin, and the more it threatens to be revealed, the more it becomes something else entirely: a way into a forgotten world of animals, nature, and life beyond words. Andrew Lipstein, the author of Last Resort, a novel that 'you'll think about . . . for weeks after you read the last pages' (Los Angeles Times), challenges our ideas of contemporary morality (and morality tales) in his scintillating, provocative second novel.

The Vegan

Herschel doesn't believe activists can change the world, but he believes he can with his algorithm. For Herschel, what about the world is allowed to change?

Arie P

They weren't radicals, they just wanted to feel alive; their animus wouldn't change the world outside, it only expressed a void within.

all my life I had never bothered to think about how easy it would be for animals to use themselves against us if only they knew how.

I was still clutching language, clinging to it as I would to a ladder over a too cold pool. If I was afraid the water would be painful, still I knew it wouldn't hurt me, really, and when would I ever have the chance to feel something like this again?

But now he felt, if not those thoughts exactly, then at least the presence of some wild truth- a truth not constructed by well-articulated arguments but one that could exist without words.

perhaps they were proud to have risen out of the crash.

The Vegan quotes

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