A collection of short stories explores such themes as the impact of the past on the present and of one person on another.

This book is about nature - specifically on the impact of time on nature's various aspects. A novel approach is attempted to present new ideas through the medium of imaginary discussions principally between two animal characters - a hare and a tortoise. These characters have been accorded certain human characteristics - language, basic education and knowledge of scientific concepts as put forward through quotations from scientists, scholars and philosophers. The ideas and concepts about time and natural phenomena are exemplified through a series of meetings between the two animal characters who sort out their own ideas and beliefs about the mysteries of time.

"An accessible and engaging exploration of the mysteries of time." -Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe Twenty years ago, Stephen Hawking tried to explain time by understanding the Big Bang. Now, Sean Carroll says we need to be more ambitious. One of the leading theoretical physicists of his generation, Carroll delivers a dazzling and paradigm-shifting theory of time's arrow that embraces subjects from entropy to quantum mechanics to time travel to information theory and the meaning of life. From Eternity to Here is no less than the next step toward understanding how we came to exist, and a fantastically approachable read that will appeal to a broad audience of armchair physicists, and anyone who ponders the nature of our world.

In this book, important conceptual developments of the two major revolutions of modern physics ? the quantum and relativity theories ? are presented in a nonmathematical, dialectical form of dialogue. The implications of conflicting philosophical attitudes of these revolutions in physics and applications to topics such as cosmology/astrophysics and high energy physics are emphasized. It is argued that for any substantial progress in our understanding of 21st century physics, it will be necessary to resolve these 20th century conflicts. These richly rewarding dialogues provide a starting point for discussions that could lead to such progress. An epilogue is presented on the philosophical advantage of the dialogue form for increased understanding.

A COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY A Companion to the American Short Story traces the development of this versatile literary genre over the past two centuries. Written by leading critics in the field, and edited by two major scholars, it explores a wide range of writers, from Edgar Allen Poe and Edith Wharton, at the end of the nineteenth century to important modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Wright. Contributions with a broader focus address groups of multiethnic, Asian, and Jewish writers. Each chapter places the short story into context, focusing on the interaction of cultural forces and aesthetic principles. The Companion takes account of cutting edge approaches to literary studies and contributes to the ongoing redefinition of the American canon, embracing genres such as ghost and detective fiction, cycles of interrelated short fiction, and comic, social and political stories. The volume also reflects the diverse communities that have adopted this literary form and made it their own, featuring entries on a variety of feminist and multicultural traditions. This volume presents an important new consideration of the role of the short story in the literary history of American literature.

A series of dialogues provides meaning and hope through science and entropy reduction, led by an expert in communication and energy. A companion work to Flatland (Sayre/Emberley, 2014), these dialogues offer meaning, comfort, and direction to a world at risk of losing its faith. From the latest science and our places of greatest striving, an expert on the reduction of entropy offers a reality that is rational, faithful, and hopeful. The inventor of “chirp” FM radio and a standard energy-saving contract, Sayre has formed a dozen companies around the sciences of communication, rehabilitation, and energy. These have made him expert in reducing “entropy,” the measure of both decay and ignorance—and that is how scientists would detect intelligent life, anywhere in the universe.

Vivid, compassionate, and often disturbing, this expansive novel is John Gardner's masterpiece.

The "Philosophical Dialogues with my Friend Pi" are an intellectual experiment, with which the author wanted to carry out an incursion into the field of artificial intelligence, to try to elucidate what the current limits of this technology are, and find out to what extent point a machine can emulate one of the most outstanding characteristics of the human condition: the ability to reason from a philosophical point of view. Throughout these pages, therefore, the reader will find a great diversity of topics and questions that have been part of philosophical work for more than 2,500 years, many of which remain without a convincing answer. It can be said, without a doubt, that the performance of artificial intelligence for this task has been surprisingly good, which leads the author to think that artificial intelligence is being improved day by day, so that, in the very near future, there will be very few areas of human reality that will not be improved by this technology. We can only hope that this improvement will contribute to filling the gaps and difficulties that human beings have faced since they appeared on this planet.

Focuses on a range of Jewish and non-Jewish writers to examine the intersection of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and secular Jewish literatures. Kabbalah and Literature shows how the Jewish mystical tradition contributes to the renewal of literature in a modern, global, and increasingly disconnected age. Kitty Millet explores Kabbalah's conceptual underpinnings, aesthetic principles, tenets, and signifiers to demonstrate how literature's absorption of kabbalistic material has altered its ontology, function, and the tasks it sets for itself. Reading writers from Europe and the Americas, Kitty Millet maps how the kabbalist's desire to "recover Eden" transforms into a latent messianic drive only intuitable through text. Thus it charts a journey of sorts, a migration of Jewish mystical material embedded surreptitiously within text in order to shift ever so slightly at times the range of the literary to encompass an aesthetic vision not easily reducible to the literal, the known, the allegorical, or even the philosophical. In this way, Kabbalah and Literature proposes a novel, intuitive approach, shifting focus away from the Jewish text's epistemological elements to embrace its "secrets."