The hilarious underground bestseller about one woman’s pursuit of carnal pleasure—and the philosophy that gets in the way. When Renee Feuer goes to college, one of the first lessons she tries to learn is how to liberate herself from the restrictions of her Orthodox Jewish background. As she discovers the pleasures of the body, Renee also learns about the excitements of the mind. She enrolls as a philosophy graduate student, then marries Noam Himmel, the world-renowned mathematician. But Renee discovers that being married to a genius is a less elevating experience than expected, and that the allure of sex still beckons. Her quest for a solution to the conflicting demands of sensuality and spirit is a touching and always humorous adventure. “Terrific. . . . The first fifty or so pages are so clever and funny that I had to put the book down and go to the fridge to cool off.”—The New York Times Book Review “A terrific first novel . . . Goldenstein is intelligent and perceptive, bawdy and witty—an articulate writer of great talent.”—The Los Angeles Times Book Review

The Mind-Body Problem (Contemporary American Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Goldstein, Rebecca

United States

Penguin Publishing Group

A National Jewish Honor Book composed of seven short stories from the author of The Mind-Body Problem. A mathematician studies the geometry of soap bubbles and responds to the rapture of infatuation by reciting Shakespeare in Yiddish. A group of Olympian intellects is made childlike by the appearance of a double rainbow. Becky Sharp steps out of the pages of Vanity Fair to confound a pretentious philosopher. These are just some of the marvelous and unlikely things that happen in Strange Attractors—a collection of stories that explores the interactions of thought and feeling, mind and heart, to reveal the deep, mysterious ties between seemingly unrelated lives. “A wonderful collection . . . A picture of remarkable depth and complexity.”—Los Angeles Times “Electric and compelling . . . Rebecca Goldstein brings a keen and specially informed vision to our world.”—Newsday “Rebecca Goldstein again probes the relationships between female intellect and emotion—this time in a sparkling, erudite collection in which brilliant women’s minds dictate their romantic attachments while their gender continues to dictate their fate.”—Kirkus Reviews

Strange Attractors: Stories (Contemporary American Fiction)

Hedda, a writer of angry feminist novels, has fled New York City to write in solitude in an old house on the coast of Maine. Her only interruptions come in unwelcome phone calls from her self-absorbed and many-times divorced sister Stella, describing the sessions with her psychoanalyst. Between the sisters there is anger and disdain, but there are also childhood traumas and secrets that inexorably link them. And within the sisters’ story is Hedda’s own novel in progress: a tale of two Victorian sisters, both spinsters, and both verging on madness. With the themes of passion and intellect, overlapping stories and unsettling dualities, The Dark Sister is a compelling blend of philosophy and dark humor, from one of today’s most provocative novelists. “Clever, observant and nimble. . . . One has the sense of reading a writer who has just discovered the full possibilities of her talent.”—The New York Times “A successful blend of metaphysical suspense and satirical comment.”—Chicago Tribune “The Dark Sister is brilliantly ingenious, beautifully written, and thoroughly alarming.”—Iris Murdoch

The Dark Sister (Contemporary American Fiction)

Literary

Penguin??Books

A novel of three generations of Jewish women begins with Sasha, the matriarch, who has learned of Mazel, the great confounder of order and predictability, from her experiences in pre-war Warsaw and her current life in New York, as she passes this knowledge onto her daughter and granddaughter. Reprint.

Mazel

Mazel means luck in Yiddish, and luck is the guiding force in this magical and mesmerizing novel that spans three generations. Sasha Saunders is the daughter of a Polish rabbi who abandons the shtetl and wins renown as a Yiddish actress in Warsaw and New York. Her daughter Chloe becomes a professor of classics at Columbia. Chloe's daughter Phoebe grows up to become a mathematician who is drawn to traditional Judaism and the sort of domestic life her mother and grandmother rejected. Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award

Mazel (Library of American Fiction)

University of Wisconsin Press

If you like the fiction of Henry James, the psychology of his brother William, and have a taste for Gothic mysteries you will enjoy The Dark Sister. The novel is a curious mixture of the Victorian repressiveness about sex, intricate stories within stories, and Jewish humor. With a new afterword

The Dark Sister (Library of American Fiction)

After Cass Seltzer’s book becomes a surprise best seller, he’s dubbed “the atheist with a soul” and becomes a celebrity. He wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum, “the goddess of game theory,” and loses himself in a spiritually expansive infatuation. A former girlfriend appears: an anthropologist who invites him to join in her quest for immortality through biochemistry. And he is haunted by reminders of the two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his mentor and professor—a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism—and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius who is heir to the leadership of a Hasidic sect. Each encounter reinforces Cass’s theory that the religious impulse spills over into life at large. 36 Arguments for the Existence of God plunges into the great debate of our day: the clash between faith and reason. World events are being shaped by fervent believers at home and abroad, while a new atheism is asserting itself in the public sphere. On purely intellectual grounds the skeptics would seem to have everything on their side. Yet people refuse to accept their seemingly irrefutable arguments and continue to embrace faith in God as their source of meaning, purpose, and comfort. Through the enchantment of fiction, award-winning novelist and MacArthur Fellow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein shows that the tension between religion and doubt cannot be understood through rational argument alone. It also must be explored from the point of view of individual people caught in the raptures and torments of religious experience in all their variety. Using her gifts in fiction and philosophy, Goldstein has produced a true crossover novel, complete with a nail-biting debate (“Resolved: God Exists”) and a stand-alone appendix with the thirty-six arguments (and responses) that propelled Seltzer to stardom.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

Pantheon

Is philosophy obsolete? Are the ancient questions still relevant in the age of cosmology and neuroscience, not to mention crowd-sourcing and cable news? The acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein provides a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden role in today’s debates on religion, morality, politics, and science. At the origin of Western philosophy stands Plato, who got about as much wrong as one would expect from a thinker who lived 2,400 years ago. But Plato’s role in shaping philosophy was pivotal. On her way to considering the place of philosophy in our ongoing intellectual life, Goldstein tells a new story of its origin, re-envisioning the extraordinary culture that produced the man who produced philosophy. But it is primarily the fate of philosophy that concerns her. Is the discipline no more than a way of biding our time until the scientists arrive on the scene? Have they already arrived? Does philosophy itself ever make progress? And if it does, why is so ancient a figure as Plato of any continuing relevance? Plato at the Googleplex is Goldstein’s startling investigation of these conundra. She interweaves her narrative with Plato’s own choice for bringing ideas to life—the dialogue. Imagine that Plato came to life in the twenty-first century and embarked on a multicity speaking tour. How would he handle the host of a cable news program who denies there can be morality without religion? How would he mediate a debate between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a tiger mom on how to raise the perfect child? How would he answer a neuroscientist who, about to scan Plato’s brain, argues that science has definitively answered the questions of free will and moral agency? What would Plato make of Google, and of the idea that knowledge can be crowd-sourced rather than reasoned out by experts? With a philosopher’s depth and a novelist’s imagination and wit, Goldstein probes the deepest issues confronting us by allowing us to eavesdrop on Plato as he takes on the modern world. (With black-and-white photographs throughout.)

Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

History

Humor & Satire

Schocken

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Goldstein, Rebecca. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Goldstein, Rebecca

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Goldstein, Rebecca. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Mind-Body Problem (Contemporary American Fiction)

Strange Attractors: Stories (Contemporary American Fiction)

The Dark Sister (Contemporary American Fiction)

Mazel

Mazel (Library of American Fiction)

The Dark Sister (Library of American Fiction)

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away