Ordinary Matters

In 1895 Alfred Nobel rewrote his will and left his fortune made in dynamite and munitions to generations of thinkers. Since 1901 women have been honoured with Nobel Prizes for their scientific research twenty times, including Marie Curie twice. Spanning more than a century and ranging across the world, this inventive story collection is inspired by these women whose work has altered history and saved millions of lives. From a transformative visit to the Grand Canyon to a baby washing up on a Queensland beach, a climate protest during a Paris heatwave to Stockholm on the eve of the 1977 Nobel Prize ceremony, Ordinary Matter explores the nature of ingenuity and discovery, motherhood and sacrifice, illness and legacy. Sometimes the extraordinary pivots on the ordinary.

Shortlisted for the 2017 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship Ordinary Matters is the first major interdisciplinary study of the ordinary in modernist women's literature and photography. It examines how women photographers and writers including Helen Levitt, Lee Miller, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson envision the sphere of ordinary life in light of the social and cultural transformations of the period that shaped and often radically re-shaped it: for example, urbanism, instrumentalism, the Great Depression and war. Through a series of case studies that explore such topics as the street, domestic things, gesture and the face, Sim contends that the paradigmatic shifts that define early twentieth-century modernity not only inform modernist women's aesthetics of the everyday, but their artistic and ethical investments in that sphere. The everyday has been noted as a “keynote of the New Modernist Studies” (Todd Avery). Ordinary Matters comprises a vital contribution to recent scholarship on the topic and will be of value to scholars working in British and American modernism, multimedia modernisms, photography, twentieth-century literature, and critical and cultural histories of the everyday.

Jenny McPhee's critically acclaimed debut, The Center of Things, was hailed by O, The Oprah Magazine as "a smart novel of love, lust, and life's miraculous randomness." The New York Times Book Review called it "an engaging novel about big ideas." In her delightful new novel, No Ordinary Matter, McPhee turns her razor-sharp pen on the offbeat worlds of soap operas, mistaken identities, private detectives, and sibling rivalries as she deftly navigates the territory between coincidence and fate. Veronica Moore writes for a daytime drama while secretly composing a musical and has fallen in love with Alex Drake, who plays a neurologist on her show. Lillian Moore is a neurologist who is pregnant from a one-night stand. Veronica and Lillian have hired Brian Byrd, P. I., to uncover the mystery surrounding their father's death. Before they know it, unexpected answers come crawling out of the woodwork. The sisters meet monthly at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where they entangle their futures and unravel their pasts, setting the stage for a series of revelations that will change the course of everyone's lives. This fast-paced narrative is full of situations worthy of the steamiest of soaps, and yet McPhee renders this fantastical world delightfully ordinary. No Ordinary Matter is as addictive as a soap opera, as high-kicking as a Broadway show, as insightful as an MRI, and as satisfying as a buttery croissant. With its sly charm and witty sophistication, McPhee's new novel is another sparkling gem from a rising literary star.

This book is about women's exploration of the relations between their private and public selves--it examines the voices with which women speak to their students, their colleagues, and themselves. The major audience is women interested in women's identity and identity construction as well as writing.

The book describes a history of the vortex theory. Introduced at the dawn of science almost 2600 years ago, it had passed through five phases of accumulation of its strength by absorbing the discoveries made during the Greek civilization, the Copernicus Revolution, the age of electromagnetism, the atomic age, and the information age. During the first four phases (see Chapters 1 through 12 of this book), the development of the vortex theory followed the same misfortunate pattern. Each time, this theory managed to bring attention of a new generation of brilliant scientists, who were enchanted by a deep physical meaning of its basic concept. But, although they employed the latest advances in science, none of them was able to produce a mathematical tool making the vortex theory practically usable. The fifth phase began in 1993 with the discovery of a unique spacetime spiral element, called the toryx. The toryx is a particular case of a multiple-level dynamic spiral with a poetic name helicola that describes the paths of all moving celestial bodies in our universe. The ability of the toryx to be turned inside out made it perfect for modeling the polarized prime elements of matter. A close offspring of the toryx called the helyx turned out to be ideal for modeling the polarized prime elements of the radiation particles. This discovery led to the development of a new version of the vortex theory called Three-Dimensional Spiral String Theory (3D-SST) outlined in Chapters 13 through 16.

Hiring a private detective to investigate the mysterious auto accident that took their father's life twenty-five years earlier, a pregnant neurologist and a soap-opera writer find their quest challenged when the father of the neurologist's baby lands a role on the writer's show. 35,000 first printing.

An art teacher sends four of her students on a guerrilla mission. A young runner struggles to make sense of his best friend's death. A health-food company adopts a farcical promotional strategy. A factory worker spends her days applying radioactive paint to watches, while dreaming of a future with her new suitor. With a keen eye for detail and rich emotional insight, Laura Elvery reveals the fears and fantasies of everyday people searching for meaning. Ranging from tender poignancy to wry humor, this beguiling collection marks the debut of one of a rising star.