Strange Attractors: Stories (Contemporary American Fiction)

Rebecca Goldstein's first novel. The Mind-Body Problem, established her as a writer of uncommon talent and versatility. Her most recent, The Dark Sister, caused one reviewer to comment that, "with this book, one has the exhilarating sense of reading a writer who has discovered the full possibilities of her talent." And, as you might expect from a writer trained as a philosopher, Rebecca Goldstein turns the full force of her dazzling energy and intelligence to this, her first collection of stories. These are stories that carry the weight and complexity of novels, whose characters are so beautifully developed that they come to haunt the reader long after the last page has been turned. Only Rebecca Goldstein could give us a heroine who studies the mathematics of soap bubbles - and responds to the rapture of infatuation by reciting Shakespeare in Yiddish. And only Rebecca Goldstein could depict with unswerving accuracy a group of Olympian intellects made childlike by the appearance of a double rainbow in a French sky. These are just some of the marvelous, magical, and unlikely things that happen in Strange Attractors - a collection of stories that reveals the deep, mysterious ties between seemingly unrelated lives. Goldstein is both an immensely gifted writer and erudite philosopher, and her characters think as intensely as they feel. Out of the interaction of thought and feeling, mind and heart, come these seven ambitious and splendidly witty explorations of the labyrinths of consciousness, the fragile mysteries of love, and the forces that - like the mathematical notion of "strange attractors" - bring a secret order to the chaotic randomness of life.