The Unknown Knowns

Jeffrey Rotter’s "brilliantly comic" debut novel has "earned him every kind of comparison—Kaufmanesque, Vonnegutesque, Pynchonesque" (New Statesman, U.K.).

Jim Rath’s wife has grown tired of his hobbies: his immaculately maintained comics collection, his creepy underwater experiments, and his dreams of building a museum based on the Aquatic Ape Theory of Human Evolution. On the night that she leaves him, Jim thinks he has spotted an emissary from a lost aquatic race called the Nautikons. In...