“Weird and wild.” —BookRiot “An effective critique of authoritarianism.” —NPR “Equal parts dystopia, satire, and allegory. —Los Angeles Review of Books Set against the backdrop of a failed political uprising in Egypt, this chilling debut evokes Orwellian dystopia, Kafkaesque surrealism, and a very real vision of life after the Arab Spring. In a surreal, but familiar, vision of modern day Egypt, a centralized authority known as ‘the Gate’ has risen to power in the aftermath of the ‘Disgraceful Events,’ a failed popular uprising. Citizens are required to obtain permission from the Gate in order to take care of even the most basic of their daily affairs, yet the Gate never opens, and the queue in front of it grows longer. Citizens from all walks of life mix and wait in the sun: a revolutionary journalist, a sheikh, a poor woman concerned for her daughter’s health, and even the brother of a security officer killed in clashes with protestors. Among them is Yehia, a man who was shot during the Events and is waiting for permission from the Gate to remove a bullet that remains lodged in his pelvis. Yehia’s health steadily declines, yet at every turn, officials refuse to assist him, actively denying the very existence of the bullet. Ultimately it is Tarek, the principled doctor tending to Yehia’s case, who must decide whether to follow protocol as he has always done, or to disobey the law and risk his career to operate on Yehia and save his life. Written with dark, subtle humor, The Queue describes the sinister nature of authoritarianism, and illuminates the way that absolute authority manipulates information, mobilizes others in service to it, and fails to uphold the rights of even those faithful to it.

"Vladimir Sorokin’s first published novel, The Queue, is a sly comedy about the late Soviet “years of stagnation.” Thousands of citizens are in line for . . . nobody knows quite what, but the rumors are flying. Leather or suede? Jackets, jeans? Turkish, Swedish, maybe even American? It doesn’t matter–if anything is on sale, you better line up to buy it. Sorokin’s tour de force of ventriloquism and formal daring tells the whole story in snatches of unattributed dialogue, adding up to nothing less than the real voice of the people, overheard on the street as they joke and curse, fall in and out of love, slurp down ice cream or vodka, fill out crossword puzzles, even go to sleep and line up again in the morning as the queue drags on."--Amazon.com.

A “quirky, sad, and very funny” novel about suicide, matricide, and an unlikely love, from one of England’s best-loved authors (The Guardian). Determined to end it all after the death of her husband, Matilda Poliport’s carefully laid plans to kill herself are derailed when she comes to the rescue of another potential bridge jumper—a notorious young man on the run for having murdered his mother. Faced with the choice of either turning him in to the police or continuing on with her suicide attempt, Matilda makes the obvious decision and takes Hugh Warner home to stay with her while they both sort out what to do next. As Hugh and Matilda find surprising comfort in each other, secrets about Matilda’s deceased husband are revealed, leaving Matilda to face some very uncomfortable facts about her life. And as the pair plot to help Hugh escape the law, they will both need to face the truth about themselves and how far they are willing to go for each other. This “virtuoso performance of guileful plotting, deft characterizations, and malicious wit” showcases the talents of Mary Wesley at her caustic and comical best (The Times, London).

This book weighs alternative conceptions of the equal opportunity principle through empirical and ethical explorations of the Federal law directing local school districts to award special educational opportunities to students classified as learning disabled. The authors examine the vexing question of how we should distribute extra education funds.

A funny and insightful novel about an autistic teen who realises she's been missing all the signs when it comes to her romantic life.

This classic work, now available in paperback, concentrates on the basic models of queueing theory. It has a dual aim: to describe relevant mathematical techniques and to analyse the single server queue and its most important variants.

To Queue Or Not To Queue: Equilibrium Behavior in Queueing Systems focuses on the highly interesting, practical viewpoint of customer behavior and its effect on the performance of the queueing system. The book's objectives are threefold: (1) It is a comprehensive survey of the literature on equilibrium behavior of customers and servers in queueing systems. The literature is rich and considerable, but lacks continuity. This book will provide the needed continuity and cover some issues that have not been adequately treated. (2) In addition, it will examine the known results of the field, classify them and identify where and how they relate to each other. (3) And finally, it seeks to fill a number of the gaps in the literature with new results while explicitly outlining open problems in other areas. With this book, it is the authors' paramount purpose is to motivate further research and to help researchers identify new and interesting open problems.

David Fincher: Mind Games is the definitive critical and visual survey of the Academy Award– and Golden Globe–nominated works of director David Fincher. From feature films Alien 3, Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, and Mank through his MTV clips for Madonna and the Rolling Stones and the Netflix series House of Cards and Mindhunter, each chapter weaves production history with original critical analysis, as well as with behind the scenes photography, still-frames, and original illustrations from Little White Lies' international team of artists and graphic designers. Mind Games also features interviews with Fincher's frequent collaborators, including Jeff Cronenweth, Angus Wall, Laray Mayfield, Holt McCallany, Howard Shore and Erik Messerschmidt. Grouping Fincher's work around themes of procedure, imprisonment, paranoia, prestige and relationship dynamics, Mind Games is styled as an investigation into a filmmaker obsessed with investigation, and the design will shift to echo case files within a larger psychological profile.

Why do so many people go on about queuing? Have we always been obsessed with traffic? And why do so many of us now eat lunch at our computers - al desko? We spend our days catching buses and trains, writing emails, shopping, queuing...But we know almost nothing about these activities. Exploring the history of these subjects as they come up during a typical day, starting with eating breakfast and ending with sleeping, Joe Moran tells a story about hidden social and cultural changes in Britain since the Second World War. Drawing on his academic research on everyday life, but writing with wit and lucidity for a popular audience, he shows that we know less about ourselves than we think...

This book is based on a course I have taught at Cornell University since 1965. The primary topic of this course was queueing theory, but related topics such as inventories, insurance risk, and dams were also included. As a text I used my earlier book, Queues and Inventories (John Wiley, New York, 1965). Over the years the emphasis in this course shifted from detailed analysis of probability models to the study of stochastic processes that arise from them, and the subtitle of the text, "A Study of Their Basic Stochastic Processes," became a more appropriate description of the course. My own research into the fluctuation theory for U:vy processes provided a new perspective on the topics discussed, and enabled me to reorganize the material. The lecture notes used for the course went through several versions, and the final version became this book. A detailed description of my approach will be found in the Introduction. I have not attempted to give credit to authors of individual results. Readers interested in the historical literature should consult the Selected Bibliography given at the end of the Introduction. The original work in this area is presented here with simpler proofs that make full use of the special features of the underlying stochastic processes. The same approach makes it possible to provide several new results. Thanks are due to Kathy King for her excellent typing of the manuscript.