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

NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRING JOHN BOYEGA, OLIVIA COOKE AND BILL SKARSGÅRD "The Wire written by Voltaire" Sunday Times "Crime and Punishment as reimagined by the Coen Brothers" The Millions Casi is a hotshot public defender working on the front line of America's War on Drugs. So far he's on the winning side. He's never lost a case. But nothing lasts forever, and pride like his has a long way to fall. Funny, smart and always surprising, A Naked Singularity speaks a language all of its own and reads like nothing else ever written. Casi's beautiful mind and planetary intelligence make him an inimitable and unforgettable narrator. In De La Pava's hands, the labyrinthine miseries of the New York Justice System are as layered and diabolical as Dante's nine circles of Hell. But the Devil doesn't hog the best lines. There are plenty here to go around.

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.

When Hali’s father asks her to help him commit suicide to spare the family the misery of a long illness, she reluctantly agrees. Hali’s family insists on letting “God’s will” decide. Hali, brooding upon the idea of predetermination and an afterlife in a way that is both challenging and deeply moving, is ultimately unable to do what her father wishes. She is forced to accept the help of a manipulative male nurse, adding further complications and a slow and painful 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.

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.

A dazzling fourth novel by the author of The Recognitions, Carpenter’s Gothic, and JR uses his considerable powers of observation and satirical sensibilities to take on the American legal system.