Strange Attractors: Stories (Contemporary American Fiction) - Softcover

Goldstein, Rebecca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140172467 ISBN 13: 9780140172461

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 1994

Synopsis

A National Jewish Honor Book composed of seven short stories from the author of The Mind-Body Problem.
 
A mathematician studies the geometry of soap bubbles and responds to the rapture of infatuation by reciting Shakespeare in Yiddish. A group of Olympian intellects is made childlike by the appearance of a double rainbow. Becky Sharp steps out of the pages of Vanity Fair to confound a pretentious philosopher. These are just some of the marvelous and unlikely things that happen in Strange Attractors—a collection of stories that explores the interactions of thought and feeling, mind and heart, to reveal the deep, mysterious ties between seemingly unrelated lives.

“A wonderful collection . . . A picture of remarkable depth and complexity.”—Los Angeles Times

“Electric and compelling . . . Rebecca Goldstein brings a keen and specially informed vision to our world.”—Newsday
 
“Rebecca Goldstein again probes the relationships between female intellect and emotion—this time in a sparkling, erudite collection in which brilliant women’s minds dictate their romantic attachments while their gender continues to dictate their fate.”—Kirkus Reviews

About this title

About the Author

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein received her doctorate in philosophy from Princeton University. Her award-winning books include the novels The Mind-Body Problem, Properties of Light, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, and nonfiction studies of Kurt Gödel and Baruch Spinoza. Her most recent work, Plato at the Googleplex, was released by Pantheon Books in March of 2014. She has received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, has been designated a Humanist of the Year and a Freethought Heroine, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in Massachusetts.Rebecca Goldstein is represented by Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau (prhspeakers.com).

From Publishers Weekly

Nine somewhat cumbersome short stories continue the philosophical musings earlier sounded in Goldstein's novels The Dark Sister and The Mind-Body Problem (see Paperback Forecasts this issue). Here, a predominantly intellectual cast explores the relationships between art and experience, intellect and passion, tradition and ambition. Peripheral links among the various entries, meanwhile, reinforce Goldstein's suggestion of discernible patterns within a world of mysteries. Goldstein adopts playful tactics--a hostile academic audience listens as a character from Vanity Fair delivers a paper on fictional realism in "The Predicate of Existence"; a 19th-century governess fashions her own gothic romance in "From Dreams of the Dangerous Duke." Another favored subject--a younger generation's response to its Jewish heritage--is explored from opposing points of view in "Mindel Gittel," told by a refugee from the Holocaust, and "Rabbinical Eyes," related by a rabbi's daughter. In general, however, Goldstein subordinates plot, pacing and character development to exposition of her themes; although she tries out different narrative voices , she achieves spontaneity rarely. Pleasure, for the reader as well as the protagonists, is chiefly cerebral.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0140172467
• ISBN 13: 9780140172461
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288