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• The Fact Checker - 2025 Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, NY

• Weekend Edition Saturday - https://www.npr.org/2025/04/12/nx-s1-5136674/former-new-yorker-fact-checker-austin-kelley-on-his-novel-and-being-inspired-by-real-life

  Former New Yorker fact checker Austin Kelley on his novel and being inspired by real life
  NPR
  By Scott Simon
  Published April 12, 2025 at 8:03 AM EDT
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  SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

  A fact checker at a respected magazine didn't expect the "Mandeville/Green" piece about a farmers market in New York City, 2004, to be an oozer, as he puts it. It's a food piece, the unnamed narrator narrates. It's not going to kill anyone. But the fact checker reads that a tomato grower named Sylvia refers to nefarious business at the market. He finds Sylvia to ask what she means, and that's when the quest for real facts begins. "The Fact Checker" is the first novel from Austin Kelley - a former New Yorker magazine fact checker, in fact. He joins us from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

  AUSTIN KELLEY: Thank you.

  SIMON: You'll be fact-checking this interview, won't you?

  KELLEY: (Laughter) Yeah, I hope not.

  SIMON: And an oozer?

  KELLEY: Yeah. An oozer - I would say one that you're not quite sure where things are going or what's solid and what's not.

  SIMON: I'm going to use that a lot from now on. Tell us a little more about how the story unfolds. There is something that gets kind of handed to him, isn't there?

  KELLEY: Well, he has this story. And it's a story, as you said, he doesn't expect to be a big deal 'cause it's a farmers market story, and he's usually busy working on things that are about the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. So this is a - sort of a lighthearted piece. But when he gets to this one line that he feels is a negative portrayal of the farmers market, he suddenly gets kind of fixated on that. And when he meets Sylvia, this farmer who supposedly said those negative things, he gets fixated on her. Then, when she disappears and doesn't really give him any explanation, the rest is trying to find out what really happened to her.

  SIMON: Sylvia grows - is it Rampoho tomatoes? How do we pronounce that?

  KELLEY: Ramapo, I think, is the way I pronounce it in my head. And I believe that's what they said at Rutgers, where those tomatoes were actually developed originally.

  SIMON: As I found out because...

  KELLEY: (Laughter).

  SIMON: ...I thought, oh, he made this up (laughter). But, no, it was developed at Rutgers. That's an actual New Jersey...

  KELLEY: Yeah.

  SIMON: ...Tomato, isn't it?

  KELLEY: Yeah. And every year, they have - Rutgers has a tomato festival. I like to go. I've gone a couple of times.

  SIMON: I have to ask - did you ever do anything remotely like this as a fact checker at the New Yorker?

  KELLEY: No.

  (LAUGHTER)

  KELLEY: Not really. I mean, there are some kernels of truth in there - little bits and pieces from the real experience of checking facts, which I hope come across to the reader.

  SIMON: Oh, yeah. But what makes the fact checker suspect that the nefarious business at this farmers market isn't just buying tomatoes at Costco and reselling them for three times the price?

  KELLEY: This fact checker, this narrator, is particularly skeptical, essentially. So at one point in the novel, he thinks maybe there's a - drug sales going on at the farmers market, or something is being sold that shouldn't be. I thought the farmers market was kind of an interesting setting because we think of that food as being so pure, and so straight from the Earth, that it would be interesting to have a character be even skeptical of that.

  SIMON: The fact checker and Sylvia meet. They drink. They dine. They become involved.

  KELLEY: Yeah. I think that that confusion between whether or not this character is sort of interested in this woman and curious about her, or whether he's really trying to find the heart of the truth in the story, is something that he's not quite sure about and that he kind of gets mixed up about, as well. And I think - I think it's both. He wants to know Sylvia better, and he's very idealistic. And he sees something idealistic about this tomato farmer, and he's interested in her. So he's kind of pursuing both, and they get compounded, I guess.

  SIMON: Could I get you to read from your novel the note that Sylvia leaves on the fact checker's pillow?

  KELLEY: Sure.

  (Reading) The note said, dear fact checker. Sorry to leave so early, but I have to take care of some things. You were right about that. Anyway, thanks. I'll call you in a few days. XO, Sylvia. P.S. Yes - let's do it.

  SIMON: Let's do what?

  KELLEY: (Laughter) Yes, let's do what? I mean, that's the big question that I think he wants to pursue at the end. And he won't - he doesn't know if - what exactly she meant by that.

  SIMON: Yeah. Can you share with us a fact that you checked years ago at The New Yorker that still kind of astounds you?

  KELLEY: Well, right in the very beginning of the novel, I mention talking to Shaquille O'Neal's girlfriend.

  SIMON: Yes.

  KELLEY: And this came from a real profile of Shaquille O'Neal.

  SIMON: About the tattoos, as I recall.

  KELLEY: Yeah.

  SIMON: Yeah.

  KELLEY: She had to take his shirt off to check the spelling of the tattoo that was right next to his navel, which I think was, lil warrior. And I remember it very well 'cause I could hear him kind of snickering in the background. And meanwhile, she was checking not only the spelling but the punctuation. What was capital? What was lowercase? So we were thorough.

  SIMON: I bet that's memorable for him, too.

  (LAUGHTER)

  SIMON: Are fact checkers, as we learn from this one, detectives at heart?

  KELLEY: Yeah. I think when I worked as a fact checker, I always thought there was a little bit of detective work that you would do every day, and I always thought that that was an interesting and fun part of it. I thought the fact checker was kind of a funny version of the classic detective - a little bit more nerdy.

  SIMON: Is this fact checker an alter ego for you?

  KELLEY: (Laughter) I hope not, but probably (laughter). I mean, there are many ridiculous things about him and silly lapses. I hope I don't have those, but probably I do. We never know.

  SIMON: Austin Kelley - his new novel, "The Fact Checker." Thank you so much for being with us.

  KELLEY: Thank you so much. What a pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

  NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

• Literary Hub - https://lithub.com/from-fact-checking-to-fiction-on-the-multifaceted-and-often-fruitless-pursuit-of-truth/

  On the Multifaceted and Often Fruitless Pursuit of Truth
  Austin Kelley Considers the Evolving Role of Fact-Checkers in an Era of Endless Lies
  By Austin Kelley
  April 15, 2025
  When I was a young, confused graduate student, I became a fact checker. I was tired of not-writing my dissertation and wanted to do something more useful, more literary. I found work as a copy editor with a bit of fact checking thrown in.

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  The magazine was not exactly literary, but it might have been useful. It was Mother Earth News, which still exists, a compendium for back-to-the-landers and seed bankers, and I checked facts about solar panels and acorns. It’s tempting to think those were simpler times. There were no fact-checking websites or fact-checking robots. No lying robots, either. Or not that I knew of. Instead, I was looking up information in books: Yes, squirrels sometimes dig holes and don’t put any acorns in them, but then fill them back up to trick acorn thieves.

  I bounced around as a freelance checker after that: Spin, Vogue, Teen Vogue! For a few years, I checked at The New Yorker which was sort of like joining the Yankees of fact-checking. There, fact checking is actually prestigious. When you call a source, they answer! Sometimes they are nervous. And the checking department is big: a whole team of nerdy skeptics like me pick apart each article and then put it back together before it goes to press. They even check poetry and cartoons (For a while, I was in charge of both). This picking apart includes basic questions: Is Nicki Minaj spelled correctly? (Check.) Is “full fathoms five” really 30 feet deep? (Check.) Do whales have whiskers? (Sort of. Some have hair follicles that, scientists suspect, they use as a sense organ).

  I liked all the weirdly obsessive questioning. It felt occasionally useful, and even literary.
  I liked all the weirdly obsessive questioning. It felt occasionally useful, and even literary. In my novel The Fact Checker, I pulled a few examples from my real experience. Once, while I was on the phone with Shaquille O’Neal’s girlfriend, I had her strip off his shirt in order to confirm the spelling of a tattoo near his belly button (“LIL Warrior”—No apostrophes). Another time, when I asked Tony Curtis about the cat he named after his ex-girlfriend Marilyn Monroe, he described their sexual relationship—in much more detail than I needed.

  Checking, of course, isn’t all bedroom talk. Nor is it all concerned with “facts.” I wonder if this is why longtime fact checkers often drop the “fact” from their title and just call themselves “checkers.” Their purview is broader than facticity. They check logic; they check fairness. How much evidence do we have for a claim? What objections might someone raise? What’s worth saying in print? Checkers will tweak the tiniest things to ensure that the story is carefully wrought and truer. They will sometimes add a “may” or a “perhaps” into a sentence just to inject a bit of doubt. Once upon a time, I thought that readers were attuned to the shades of nuance that mays and the perhapses lend to a statement. These days, I’m not so sure.

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  But every one of those mays was backed by a lot of work. One of my favorite things about checking was the use of colored pencils. For a particularly complex story a checker might underline all the passages that came from a key source—let’s say a government leaker—in red, all the background facts in blue, quotes from other sources in green, and so on. Some sentences might be underlined in multiple colors because they came from multiple sources, or because the checker wants to make sure to double or triple check a key idea.

  Fact checking is certainly no guarantor of fairness and no panacea.
  At The New Yorker, before going to press, we printed out galleys with a single narrow column of text running down the middle of the page and a ton of blank space on each margin for comments and queries and suggested edits. A well-checked proof was a colorful map of the deconstruction and reconstruction of a story. And then right before a story went to press, the fact checker, the editor, the writer, and the head copy editor would get together and assess the story page by page, talking out any final concerns they might have. At its best, this was a model for good thinking—multiple people trying to inhabit multiple perspectives to make a story about the world a better, truer, and more just story.

  Such closing meetings, even if they inspired debate, required a shared ethos. That’s one of the reasons that fact checking of politicians throws me. Though it shares a name, it is an entirely different beast—one that pits the checker against a politician’s word, not working with it. I can’t read the fact checking of Trump. Checkers point out his outrageous lies, and then spill even more ink showing how many of his claims are “misleading.” I understand the impulse: the checkers are working under the same premise they do when checking a journalist. They want to do more than correct information; they want to correct faulty logic and bad thinking. But the well of bad thinking is deep. Trump is factually wrong and also deeply wrong. He doesn’t care for evidence—or other people. I’m not sure fact checkers, low-ranking nitpickers, can help.

  I’m always wary, in fact, of the kind of people who think fact checking is some messianic practice, or that all we need to do is reveal the truth and justice will follow. This reminds me of those think-tanky technocrats who assume that if we let the experts fix the systems, all will be right. There’s no need for politicking, persuasion, and community-building. There’s no need for debating what we value, and how to value it best and how to manifest those values in the face of the facts before us. Fact checking is certainly no guarantor of fairness and no panacea. In my novel, fact checking actually becomes a pathology. The narrator is so obsessed with finding some hidden truth that he goes rogue and loses his shit. Maybe this is a condition we all face—in a world that is increasingly a morass of complicated and predatory lies.

  “Increasingly?” Can we fact check that? The Fact Checker is set in 2004 before Truth Social or Meta but those were also the days of WMDs and Known Unknowns. Part of the reason I set the novel in that era is because it felt like the beginning of an unraveling. I imagine, though, that McCarthyism felt like that too, and the Spanish American War, and before. There’s no golden age of truth. Still, I can’t imagine being a checker today. It must feel like sticking your finger in a dike while an ocean of lying algorithms and evil billionaires bears down on you. On the bright side, the kid who stuck his finger in the dike did end up saving the whole town. That’s at least how the story goes—a story embedded within a work of fiction, Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, an 1865 novel by American magazine editor Mary Mapes Dodge—and fiction is always more compelling than fact.

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  The Fact Checker by Austin Kelley is available from Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.

• Amazon -

  Austin Kelley is a former New Yorker fact checker. As a journalist he has written for The New York Times, The Nation, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker. He has a Ph.D. from Duke University, and now teaches writing at NYU. The Fact Checker is his first novel.

Austin Kelley gently lampoons high-minded magazines and the fragile men who work at them in his debut novel, ''The Fact Checker.''

THE FACT CHECKER, by Austin Kelley

Hollywood aspirants had the William Morris mailroom. Junior literati long vied to join The New Yorker's fact-checking department (or, for the gals, the typing pool). They hoped to breathe the magic vapors of E.B. White while cooking up the Great American Novel.

In the age of ''truthiness'' and ''fake news,'' and with ChatGPT hovering like a mockingbird, the role of fact checker has been newly narrowed and consecrated. Or so suggests ''The Fact Checker,'' the first novel by Austin Kelley, a former New Yorker fact checker. It's a sprightly hyperlocal caper that is also, intentionally or not, a Notes and Comment on the fragile state of urban intellectual masculinity.

We've come a long way from ''Bright Lights, Big City,'' which jump-started the career of Jay McInerney, another former New Yorker fact checker, in 1984 ... or have we?

Both books have unnamed young male protagonists. Both lampoon entrenched procedures and starchy characters at the New Yorkerish magazines where they toil: In ''The Fact Checker,'' which is set in 2004, there's a veteran checker named Mr. Lancaster, ''a frail old ghost of a man'' who stocks the house library with multiple volumes on Civil War artillery and is comically conscripted to check a piece on the rapper 50 Cent.

Both narrators bop around downtown and go on benders, though the preferred poison of Kelley's is whiskey, not Bolivian marching powder. Both pine for their exes; then, a fashion model named Amanda; now, a graduate student, Magdalena.

Our 21st-century fact checker used to be a graduate student, too, specializing in 19th-century utopianism, until he realized ''no one really wanted to read academic history.'' He worships the Fonz and looks like Tony Shalhoub, the actor. He loves watching baseball and hates playing. ''There was that painful slow time when the ball arced through the air. It was excruciating. Was I under it? Yes. No. Yes. No. Too late.''

Since Magda ran off with a professor, he has struggled with romance in New York, where -- and this was before the apps -- dates and meetings are oft confused and ''everyone was tentative and ambiguous.'' He is, he comes to realize with some consternation, ''a meat eater who's never killed anything.'' One of the things he's compulsive about checking is the fly of his pants.

Kelley's hero doesn't long to escape his duties, as McInerney's dissolute alter ego did, but takes pride in his variegated beta role. He's been assigned to check a story about the Union Square Greenmarket, by a debonair but careless restaurant critic named John Mandeville, one of whose sources is a farmer, Sylvia. Mandeville neglected to get her surname, and so the checker -- encouraged by the promise that she's ''interesting'' -- goes to interview her.

Who is Sylvia? Cryptic, lanky and scarred, she feeds him a life-changing heirloom tomato. She herself is something of a hot tomato.

One of the novel's charms is uncovering the vulnerable ornaments -- wacky statues, call girls on 11th Avenue, subterranean oyster restaurants -- of an increasingly ''Big Box Manhattan.'' Sylvia and the ''blank man,'' as a friend of hers calls him, visit a graveyard in the financial district on an ambiguous date, then an illegal farm-to-table supper club called Heads and Tails, consuming tongue, offal pie and pork served five ways. They hook up. And then, lacking a cellphone, as some did then -- ''trying to maintain some freedom'' -- she disappears.

Is there something more, something sinister, to Mandeville's story? To Mandeville himself?

Especially in one chapter so gruesome I had to read it through reluctantly parted fingers, ''The Fact Checker'' argues for a heightened sensitivity to the brutality of the food chain. (In this it reminded me of ''The Vegan,'' Andrew Lipstein's 2023 novel about a financier who starts hearing the animals.)

But it's also about the looming gig economy, the division of labor in the field of writing as well as potatoes. Not for nothing do we now refer to ''content farms.''

Planning a story about the Swift Boat smear campaign, the magazine's staffers can't quite see yet that they're in a changing ecosystem, where supply is soon to outpace demand and alternative facts are hopping onto the conveyor belt of public record.

In one Don Draper moment, Kelley's fact checker considers ''how strange it is to stand inside a giant building held up so high in the air, with other people standing inside a giant building on other floors, each in their own world, and how hard it is, at any minute, to know exactly where you are and what caused you to be there, and what you should do next.''

He's researching the collapse of the twin towers, which were so boldly featured on the original cover of ''Bright Lights, Big City.''

THE FACT CHECKER | By Austin Kelley | Atlantic Monthly Press | 256 pp. | $27

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PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY HIROYUKI ITO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) This article appeared in print on page BR8.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times Company
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Jacobs, Alexandra. "Page Boys." The New York Times Book Review, 25 May 2025, p. 9. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A841230044/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=028229f4. Accessed 31 July 2025.

The Fact Checker. By Austin Kelley. Apr. 2025. 256p. Atlantic Monthly, $27 (9780802164100); e-book (9780802164117).

Toiling at a weekly New York magazine in the early aughts, the Fact Checker gets a seemingly anodyne assignment about the Union Square Greenmarket, "portrayed as an ideal and an idyll." But a quote from farm-stand worker Sylvia gives him pause and ultimately sends him through a winding warren of uncertainty, which is anathema to the Fact Checker. He tracks Sylvia down, needing to know what she meant about "nefarious business" at the market. Then the two explore the city, places unknown even to the guy whose ex called him "Mr. Encyclopedia," and spend the night together before Sylvia disappears and the Fact Checker becomes a kind of PI. "All I was doing was tailing people, and I was clearly really bad at it." In his sort-of-mystery debut, with understated humor and zippy prose, former New Yorker fact-checker Kelley is a fluid and funny writer, divertingly digressing on the nature of fact-checking and filling out a backstory for the narrating Fact Checker, who, both well-informed and hilariously unaware, is as charmingly pedantic as a character could be.--Annie Bostrom

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Bostrom, Annie. "The Fact Checker." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 15-16, Apr. 2025, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847030106/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=430a0ce1. Accessed 31 July 2025.

Kelley, Austin. The Fact Checker. Atlantic Monthly. Apr. 2025.256p. ISBN 9780802164100. $27. F

[DEBUT] The protagonist of Kelley's debut is the Fact Checker, who works for a magazine in New York City in 2004 and is obsessive about checking facts for every story he is given. He is assigned to a story about the New Egypt farm in Southern New Jersey, which supplies trendy Ramapo tomatoes to the farmer's market at Union Square in Manhattan. A comment in the story from a farm worker named Sylvia about nefarious activities at the farmer's market causes him to visit the market to interview her in person. They meet, but distractions keep the Fact Checker from clarifying her comment. Then Sylvia disappears. He spends weeks looking for both Sylvia and the nefarious activities at the market, to no avail. He eventually visits the farm where Sylvia worked, thinking she has been killed by the owner. His search gets increasingly bizarre, taking him to little known comers of the city, making him question what he actually knows, along with questioning motivations, the social morals of New York City, and his place in the world. Kelley is a former fact checker for the New Yorker, providing excellent insider knowledge for this novel. VERDICT Kelley's debut it poignant, funny, and full of the quirky characters that make life interesting.--Joanna M. Burkhardt

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Burkhardt, Joanna M. "Kelley, Austin. The Fact Checker." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 3, Mar. 2025, pp. 94+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837611433/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3dfeb091. Accessed 31 July 2025.

Kelley, Austin THE FACT CHECKER Atlantic Monthly (Fiction None) $27.00 4, 15 ISBN: 9780802164100

An endearingly obsessive fact-checker stumbles around New York in search of truth, meaning, and a woman.

From theNew Yorker's iconic headline font to what certainly seem to be the real processes of the magazine's operation, Kelley's mostly charming debut is steeped in the lore of his former employer. As it opens, the unnamed narrator has received an assignment to fact-check a story known as "Mandeville/Green"--the name of the article's author plus a one-word "slug" to indicate the topic, in this case the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan: "That's Greenmarket, one word, capitalized. It's a trade name used by the Council on the Environment of New York City, a nonprofit that founded the city's farmers markets in 1976. That's the kind of thing I check first." Kelley gets often hilarious mileage out of this type of minutiae; in one memorable scene, the entire office falls silent to listen to a very senior member of the department fact-check a piece on 50 Cent. "'F-u-c-k-a?' we heard him say. 'Is that correct? Motherfucka?' He pronounced the end 'aah' like a child is supposed to when the doctor is looking down his throat." Our hero gets in over his head while trying to verify a reference to "nefarious practices" at the farmer's market, during which he meets an intriguing tomato grower named Sylvia, who becomes an obscure object of desire in and of herself. Most of this novel is wonderful, but there are a few serious caveats. One, there's an early giveaway of the outcome of one of the narrator's central quests, which dilutes its interest for the reader. Two, there is a disgusting and totally uncalled-for scene of gore, sure to turn off readers of the vegetarian persuasion. Somehow, after that nightmarish interlude, nothing seems as funny, and the close is a bit of a fizzle.

This comic novel opens brilliantly but goes a mite awry by the end. Still, a bravura debut.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Kelley, Austin: THE FACT CHECKER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A827101143/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a8df130f. Accessed 31 July 2025.

Jacobs, Alexandra. "Page Boys." The New York Times Book Review, 25 May 2025, p. 9. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A841230044/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=028229f4. Accessed 31 July 2025. Bostrom, Annie. "The Fact Checker." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 15-16, Apr. 2025, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847030106/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=430a0ce1. Accessed 31 July 2025. Burkhardt, Joanna M. "Kelley, Austin. The Fact Checker." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 3, Mar. 2025, pp. 94+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837611433/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3dfeb091. Accessed 31 July 2025. "Kelley, Austin: THE FACT CHECKER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A827101143/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a8df130f. Accessed 31 July 2025.

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