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The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel
"The Library of Babel" is arguably Jorge Luis Borges' best known story--memorialized along with Borges on an Argentine postage stamp. Now, in The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel, William Goldbloom Bloch takes readers on a fascinating tour of the mathematical ideas hidden within one of the classic works of modern literature. Written in the vein of Douglas R. Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning Godel, Escher, Bach, this original and imaginative book sheds light on one of Borges' most complex, richly layered works. Bloch begins each chapter with a mathematical idea--combinatorics, topology, geometry, information theory--followed by examples and illustrations that put flesh on the theoretical bones. In this way, he provides many fascinating insights into Borges' Library. He explains, for instance, a straightforward way to calculate how many books are in the Library--an easily notated but literally unimaginable number--and also shows that, if each book were the size of a grain of sand, the entire universe could only hold a fraction of the books in the Library. Indeed, if each book were the size of a proton, our universe would still not be big enough to hold anywhere near all the books. Given Borges' well-known affection for mathematics, this exploration of the story through the eyes of a humanistic mathematician makes a unique and important contribution to the body of Borgesian criticism. Bloch not only illuminates one of the great short stories of modern literature but also exposes the reader--including those more inclined to the literary world--to many intriguing and entrancing mathematical ideas..
Price: $19.95
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This is Unimaginable and Unavoidable
This is Unimaginable and Unavoidable (subtitle) Irresponsible Writings on Non-Duality By Guy Smith Foreword by Tony Parsons This first book by Guy Smith addresses the appearance of separation from first-hand experience in an original series of prose, verse and 'notices'. Challenging and original, it constitutes a blast of freedom written in the period six months after awakening. Guy Smith is 24 years old and lives in Bristol. "I love this book! It is passionate, uncompromising, irreverent, intimately openhanded and wonderfully without any sense of order or progression. Throughout the whole work there is very little that the cunning guru mind can get hold of and turn into a belief system. There is a powerful invitation within these outpourings which seems to harbour and generate a feeling of the sensuous, the impersonal, the unbounded mystery that lies beyond the words. This is not a book to wade through steadily, but rather a deep pool in which to dip one's foot . . . and maybe fall in. There is a proliferation of so-called Advaita/Non-dual literature available today, and virtually all of it is borne out of a fundamental misconception about the nature of being. However, during the last decade some rare, clear voices have emerged out of the mist, and Guy's work is surely an inspiring and unique confirmation of this wonderful message." From the Foreword by Tony Parsons.
Price: $10.75
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Terror and Violence: Imagination and the Unimaginable (Anthropology, Culture and Society)
What is terror? What are its roots and its results -- and what part does it play in human experience and history? This volume offers a number of timely and original anthropological insights into the ways in which acts of terror -- and reactions to those acts -- impact on the lives of virtually everyone in the world today, as perpetrators, victims or witnesses. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, what we have come to regard as acts of terror -- whether politically motivated, or state-sanctioned -- have assumed many different forms and provoked widely differing responses throughout the world. At a deeper level, the contributors explore the work of the imagination in extreme contexts of danger, such as those of terror and terrorism. By stressing the role of the imagination, and its role in amplifying the effects of experience, this collection brings together a coherent set of analyses that offer innovative and unexpected ways of understanding a major global problem of contemporary life. Professor Andrew Strathern and Dr Pamela J. Stewart are long-term research collaborators in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, USA, carrying out research in the Pacific, Asia and Europe. Dr Neil Whitehead is Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. .
Price: $27.25
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The Unimaginable Life: Lessons Learned on the Way to Love
Loggins's book, cowritten with wife Julia, shares its title with his album, both of which illustrate the couple's belief that love means falling in love again every day. Told with lyrics, poetry, letters, and journal entries, it is an intensely personal exploration Says bestselling author Julia Cameron of the Loggins's The Unimaginable Life: "It takes courage to write a book like this--and courage to read it.".
Price: $3.95
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Unimaginable Zero Summer: A Novel
Perhaps you too have experienced the nausea brought on by the arrival of an invitation to a high school reunion Bookstore clerk and culture junker Verity Presti will soon attend her fifteenth reunion with her boyfriend, the unfortunately but aptly named Charlie Brown, who lives with his parents while training to be an urban shaman—a modern-day medicine man somewhat capable of exorcising ghosts from apartments and cubicles, predicting baseball scores, and channeling lost pets. Verity, angst-ridden and burdened with fifteen years of magnificent failure, will be reunited with Craig and Carolyn, sickeningly perfect high school sweethearts, married now and perfectly sick of each other; Verity’s former crush Stan and his wife, Laurel, a frustrated author of angry haikus; and Will, a rage-aholic KJ (that’s “karaoke jockey”) whose only soft spot is the one he still has for Verity. A growing anxiety permeates the round of cocktail parties that precedes the reunion, causing old affections and animosities to boil over and threaten the dubious complacency of these seven lovable losers. With her trademark sarcasm and uncanny ability to skewer the oddities of contemporary hipster life, Stella has created a cast of endearingly eccentric characters who embody the insecurities and foibles that all of us—former prom desperados, band nerds, the burnout brigade, and loner stiffs—have and hope nobody else will notice..
Price: $4.50
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The Unimaginable Life: Lessons Learned on the Path of Love
What if the experience of falling in love didn't have to end?
What if love never died?
And what if it could happen to you? Here is a modern-day love story, the passionate account of a shared journey between Kenny and Julia Loggins along the path that illuminates all others. It is about power and paradox, sacred selfishness and vulnerability, pain and transformation, sexuality and jealously, passion and compassion, fear and spirit, creativity and a brand new kind of courage. Through intensely personal journals and love letters, lyrics and poetry, Kenny and Julia Loggins offer their intimate but universal shared experience, capable of transforming any life it touches. Here is a verbal expression of this profound spiritual warmth -- a book essential for anyone who wants to have love and to make it last. .
Price: $2.99
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Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914-1917 (Studies in War, Society, and the Militar)
As World War I shaped and molded European culture to an unprecedented degree, it also had a profound influence on the politics and aesthetics of early-twentieth-century Russian culture. In this provocative and fascinating work, Aaron J. Cohen shows how World War I changed Russian culture and especially Russian art. A wartime public culture destabilized conventional patterns in cultural politics and aesthetics and fostered a new artistic world by integrating the iconoclastic avant-garde into the art establishment and mass culture. This new wartime culture helped give birth to nonobjective abstraction (including Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square), which revolutionized modern aesthetics. Of the new institutions, new public behaviors, and new cultural forms that emerged from this artistic engagement with war, some continued, others were reinterpreted, and still others were destroyed during the revolutionary period.
Imagining the Unimaginable deftly reveals the experiences of artists and developments in mass culture and in the press against the backdrop of the broader trends in Russian politics, economics, and social life from the mid-nineteenth century to the revolution. After 1914, avant-garde artists began to imagine many things that had once seemed unimaginable. As Marc Chagall later remarked, “The war was another plastic work that totally absorbed us, which reformed our forms, destroyed the lines, and gave a new look to the universe.” .
Price: $43.65
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