1975. Christopher Reed, a young minister in his first job, receives much-needed seasoning, is necessarily dis-illusioned. How? On one level by having an affair with Becky, one of his teen-aged parishioners. But the affair begun on a theological dare so to speak, in order to test an intriguing vision of the freedom of the Gospel which Dr. Buttrick, the senior pastor under whom Reed works, a truly Christ-like man (though it depends, of course, on what your image of Jesus is) has presented. "Scrupulous," or guilt-stricken, Reed tells his wife Vinnie, an artist and a free thinker, what he has done with Becky. Vinnie erupts, then curiously adjusts, gradually accommodates herself, allows the affair to continue. Reed also tells Dr. Buttrick what he has done. Great- spirited, a wise old man, a genius, Dr. Buttrick listens and counsels. He counsels both Reed and Vinnie. The three of them discuss the limits of marriage, the relevance of Christianity to same. Vinnie and Dr. Buttrick have their own intense relationship. Meanwhile the meteoric Becky moves through her senior year in high school, fights free of her youth and prepares to leave for college. Obsessed almost, Reed suffers at the prospect of "losing" her. And grows in some ways as a person or at least as a pastor, learning to expect less of the flock which he supposedly leads, since it often acts less than nobly. Some members even turn on Dr. Buttrick, the genuinely good man, in the year of the novel's action.

1975. Christopher Reed, a young minister in his first job, receives much-needed seasoning, is necessarily disillusioned. How? On one level by having an affair with Becky Grierson, one of his teen-aged parishioners. But the affair is begun on a theological dare so to speak, in order to test an intriguing vision of the freedom of the Gospel which Dr. Buttrick, the senior pastor under whom Reed works, a truly Christ-like man (though it depends, of course, on what your image of Jesus is) has presented. "Scrupulous," or guilt-stricken, Reed tells his wife Vinnie, an artist and a free-thinker, what he has done with Becky. Vinnie erupts, then curiously, over time, adjusts, gradually accommodates herself, allows the affair to continue. Reed also tells Dr. Buttrick what he has done. Great-spirited, a wise old man, a genius, Dr. Buttrick listens and counsels. He counsels both Reed and Vinnie. The three of them discuss the limits of marriage, the relevance of Christianity to same. Vinnie and Dr. Buttrick have their own intense relationship. Meanwhile the meteoric Becky moves through her senior year in high school, fights free of her youth and prepares to leave for college. Obsessed almost, Reed suffers at the prospect of "losing" her. And grows in some way as a person or at least as a pastor, learning to expect less of the flock which he supposedly leads, since if often acts less than nobly. Some members even turn on Dr. Buttrick, the genuinely good man, in the year of the novels action.

William Guy (when he is not traveling) lives and writes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Gravitys Revolt, a novel; Defunctive Music, a book of poems;A Travelers Education; Magic Casements; and Something Sensational, three books of travel essays. With William Orr he is the author of Living Hope: a Study of the New Testament Theme of Birth from Above. He has completed a translation of The Iliad. He is presently at work on The Lyndoniad, a book of interrelated poems about the year 1968, a long poem containing history (he hopes).

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years “The comedy crackles, the puns pop, the satire explodes.”—The New York Times “The work of a virtuoso with prose . . . His intricate symbolic order [is] akin to that of Joyce’s Ulysses.”—Chicago Tribune “A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour de force.”—San Francsisco Examiner The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy. When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern California, she meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.

"It would be hard to imagine a better guide to this difficult subject." -- Scientific American In Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, Lee Smolin provides an accessible overview of the attempts to build a final "theory of everything." He explains in simple terms what scientists are talking about when they say the world is made from exotic entities such as loops, strings, and black holes and tells the fascinating stories behind these discoveries: the rivalries, epiphanies, and intrigues he witnessed firsthand. "Provocative, original, and unsettling." -- The New York Review of Books "An excellent writer, a creative thinker." -- Nature

Occupy Pynchon examines power and resistance in the writer’s post–Gravity’s Rainbow novels. As Sean Carswell shows, Pynchon’s representations of global power after the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s shed the paranoia and metaphysical bent of his first three novels and share a great deal in common with the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s critical trilogy, Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. In both cases, the authors describe global power as a horizontal network of multinational corporations, national governments, and supranational institutions. Pynchon, as do Hardt and Negri, theorizes resistance as a horizontal network of individuals who work together, without sacrificing their singularities, to resist the political and economic exploitation of empire. Carswell enriches this examination of Pynchon’s politics—as made evident in Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice (2009), and Bleeding Edge (2013)—by reading the novels alongside the global resistance movements of the early 2010s. Beginning with the Arab Spring and progressing into the Occupy Movement, political activists engaged in a global uprising. The ensuing struggle mirrored Pynchon’s concepts of power and resistance, and Occupy activists in particular constructed their movement around the same philosophical tradition from which Pynchon, as well as Hardt and Negri, emerges. This exploration of Pynchon shines a new light on Pynchon studies, recasting his post-1970s fiction as central to his vision of resisting global neoliberal capitalism.

After coming out as transgender, Chris is still processing a frightening assault he survived the year before, while Maia, grieving the loss of her older sister, is trying to find her place in the world, which makes falling in love the furthest thing on their minds--until it is not.

A daring new vision of the quantum universe, and the scandals controversies, and questions that may illuminate our future--from Canada's leading mind on contemporary physics. Quantum physics is the golden child of modern science. It is the basis of our understanding of atoms, radiation, and so much else, from elementary particles and basic forces to the behaviour of materials. But for a century it has also been the problem child of science, plagued by intense disagreements between its intellectual giants, from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking, over the strange paradoxes and implications that seem like the stuff of fantasy. Whether it's Schrödinger's cat--a creature that is simultaneously dead and alive--or a belief that the world does not exist independently of our observations of it, quantum theory is what challenges our fundamental assumptions about our reality. In Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, globally renowned theoretical physicist Lee Smolin provocatively argues that the problems which have bedeviled quantum physics since its inception are unsolved for the simple reason that the theory is incomplete. There is more, waiting to be discovered. Our task--if we are to have simple answers to our simple questions about the universe we live in--must be to go beyond it to a description of the world on an atomic scale that makes sense. In this vibrant and accessible book, Smolin takes us on a journey through the basics of quantum physics, introducing the stories of the experiments and figures that have transformed the field, before wrestling with the puzzles and conundrums that they present. Along the way, he illuminates the existing theories about the quantum world that might solve these problems, guiding us toward his own vision that embraces common sense realism. If we are to have any hope of completing the revolution that Einstein began nearly a century ago, we must go beyond quantum mechanics as we know it to find a theory that will give us a complete description of nature. In Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, Lee Smolin brings us a step closer to resolving one of the greatest scientific controversies of our age.