The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American writer and the author of The Black Swan. As a former option trader and mathematician, he approaches his subject through the lens of both lived experiences and financial investments and mathematical theory. In the opening chapter, Taleb tells the story of his departure from Lebanon during wartime and how this experience was formative. Much of Taleb's work centers around the concept of the unknown, which exacerbates and accentuates the limits of human knowledge. Taleb is highly critical of predictive theories, which he feels rely heavily on faulty assumptions and dubious logical premises. Taleb expresses his aversions to modes of thinking that try to create narratives out of Black Swans, which by nature are completely unpredictable outliers.

Krasnova is a fictional character of Taleb’s creation. She is an unpublished writer who has married and divorced three philosopher husbands. Eventually her book, A Story of Recursion, gets picked up by a publisher and becomes a massive bestseller. The small publishing house enjoys financial success because of her book. A Story of Recursion is Krasnova's first Black Swan, as its success was utterly unpredictable. In the Epilogue, Krasnova experiences a second Black Swan, but this time her highly anticipated second book is a critical success but commercial failure.