A Naked Singularity

“Propulsive . . . The novel’s chaotic sprawl, black humor and madcap digressions make it a thrilling rejoinder to the tidy story arcs [of] most crime fiction.” —The Wall Street Journal Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Best Debut Novel Named a Best Book of the Year in the Wall Street Journal, Houston Chronicle, and Philadelphia City Paper A Naked Singularity tells the story of Casi, born to Colombian immigrants, who lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as a public defender—one who, tellingly, has never lost a trial. Never. In the book, we watch what happens when his sense of justice and even his sense of self begin to crack—and how his world then slowly devolves. A huge, ambitious novel in the vein of DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Pynchon, and even Melville, it’s told in a distinct, frequently hilarious voice, with a striking human empathy at its center. Its panoramic reach takes readers through crime and courts, immigrant families and urban blight, media savagery and media satire, scatology and boxing, and even a breathless heist worthy of any crime novel. If Infinite Jest stuck a pin in the map of mid-90s culture and drew our trajectory from there, A Naked Singularity does the same for the feeling of surfeit, brokenness, and exhaustion that permeates our civic and cultural life today. In the opening sentence of William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, a character sneers, “Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this world, you get the law.” A Naked Singularity reveals the extent of that gap, and lands firmly on the side of those who are forever getting the law. “A great American novel.” —Toronto Star

This book journeys into one of the most fascinating intellectual adventures of recent decades - understanding and exploring the final fate of massive collapsing stars in the universe. The issue is of great interest in fundamental physics and cosmology today, from both the perspective of gravitation theory and of modern astrophysical observations. This is a revolution in the making and may be intimately connected to our search for a unified understanding of the basic forces of nature, namely gravity that governs the cosmological universe, and the microscopic forces that include quantum phenomena. According to the general theory of relativity, a massive star that collapses catastrophically under its own gravity when it runs out of its internal nuclear fuel must give rise to a space-time singularity. Such singularities are regions in the universe where all physical quantities take their extreme values and become arbitrarily large. The singularities may be covered within a black hole, or visible to faraway observers in the universe. Thus, the final fate of a collapsing massive star is either a black hole or a visible naked singularity. We discuss here recent results and developments on the gravitational collapse of massive stars and possible observational implications when naked singularities happen in the universe. Large collapsing massive stars and the resulting space-time singularities may even provide a laboratory in the cosmos where one could test the unification possibilities of basic forces of nature.

FROM THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF A NAKED SINGULARITY Led by a renegade young owner out for revenge against her traitorous family, the Paterson Pork—New Jersey’s only Indoor Football League franchise—is challenging the Dallas Cowboys for championship glory. Meanwhile, a brilliant and lethal mastermind has gotten himself intentionally thrown into prison on Rikers Island with plans to commit the most audacious crime of all time. And is the world ending? Maybe. Filled with impossible triumphs and grave injustices, Lost Empress is another brilliant, hilarious, and eccentric masterpiece from Sergio de la Pava: a vibrant exultation of a novel, populated by a cast of unforgettable characters—immigrants, exiles, and outsiders—who will have you rooting for them, right up until the end.

Elle, the Naked Singularity is science fiction spiked with magical realism, a story in which a college student finds herself lost in the multiverse. Twenty-year-old Elle Akamu slips from 21st century Earth through spacetime into a parallel universe in the 1970s British Hawaiian Islands. She befriends a transgender social worker, a teenage orphan, and a POW survivor in her quest to return home. Lost in the multiverse, she discovers life is about accepting her past, choosing a future, and finding love in her new world. A fusion of science and Buddhism, the story explores racism, gay rights, and gender inequality in the 1970s through the eyes of a 21st century time traveler. A stranger in a strange land, Elle wrestles with our oldest questions-what is the nature of the universe? And how do our relationships shape our world?The Wizard of Oz gets a fresh perspective in this second installment in the Lost in The Multiverse series. Elle's story proves that thoughtful science fiction can rise to new heights of beauty, meaning, and compassion.

In general relativity, a naked singularity is a gravitational singularity, without an event horizon. In a black hole, there is a region around the singularity, the event horizon, where the gravitational force of the singularity is strong enough so that light cannot escape. Hence, the singularity cannot be directly observed. A naked singularity, by contrast, is observable from the outside. The theoretical existence of naked singularities is important because their existence would mean that it would be possible to observe the collapse of an object to infinite density. It would also cause foundational problems for general relativity, because in the presence of a naked singularity, general relativity cannot make predictions about the future evolution of spacetime. Some research has suggested that if loop quantum gravity is correct, then naked singularities could exist in nature, implying that the cosmic censorship hypothesis does not hold. Numerical calculations and some other arguments have also hinted at this possibility. To this date, no naked singularities (and no event horizons) have been observed.

“Personae is not an easy read . . . But as a meditation on literature, it is playful, ambitious, and full of imagination, a 21st-century novel-of-some-kind.” —Daily Beast Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity was one of the most highly praised debut novels in decades. The Wall Street Journal called it “a propulsive, mind-bending experience,” and named it one of the ten best books of the year. This book is nothing like that one. Just look at it: A Naked Singularity was a brick of a book, 678 pages, and this one’s slim—lean and focused. A Naked Singularity locked us into the unforgettable voice of its protagonist, Casi, while Personae shimmers and shifts among different perspectives, locations, and narrative techniques. But sharp readers will quickly see that the two books are the work of the same hand. The sheer energy of De La Pava’s sentences, his eye for absurd humor, his commitment to the idea of justice—all will be familiar here as they carry us from the tale of an obsessive, damaged psychic detective consumed by a murder case, into a Sartrean drama that raises questions (and jokes) about responsibility, fate, death, and more. And when De La Pava eventually returns us to the investigation, this time seen from the other side, the lives and deaths bound up in it feel all the more real, and moving, even as solid answers slip away into mist. In some ways, despite its brevity, Personae is even more surprising and challenging than A Naked Singularity—and, in its ambition and fierce intelligence, it’s proof that Sergio De La Pava is here to stay.

Autobiographical fiction, this is a provocative tale about a daughter's choice to assist her father's death from throat cancer. A deeply moving portrait of love between a father and daughter, it's told with exquisite grace and humor and without sentimentality.

In a technologically suppressed future, information demands to be free in the debut novel from Hugo Award-winning author Charlie Stross. In the twenty-first century, life as we know it changed. Faster-than-light travel was perfected, and the Eschaton, a superhuman artificial intelligence, was born. Four hundred years later, the far-flung colonies that arose as a result of these events—scattered over three thousand years of time and a thousand parsecs of space—are beginning to rediscover their origins. The New Republic is one such colony. It has existed for centuries in self-imposed isolation, rejecting all but the most basic technology. Now, under attack by a devastating information plague, the colony must reach out to Earth for help. A battle fleet is dispatched, streaking across the stars to the rescue. But things are not what they seem—secret agendas and ulterior motives abound, both aboard the ship and on the ground. And watching over it all is the Eschaton, which has its own very definite ideas about the outcome...