Turing's Delirium


Book Description

The town of Rio Fugitivo is on the verge of a social revolution--a war waged electronically, where computer viruses are the weapons and hackers the revolutionaries. This is an edgy story about personal responsibility and complicity in a world defined by the ever-increasing gulfs between the global and the local, the virtual and the real.




Turing's Delirium


Book Description

Set in a near-future Bolivia, this “hybrid of cyberpunk and political thrillers [is] sleek, brisk, and clever” (Entertainment Weekly). Set against a backdrop of advancing globalization, this award-winning, “fast-paced” literary thriller puts a cutting-edge digital spin on the age-old fight between the oppressed and the oppressor (The Miami Herald). The South American town of Río Fugitivo is on the verge of a social revolution—not a revolution of strikes and street riots, but a war waged electronically, in which computer viruses are the weapons and hackers the revolutionaries. In this war of information, the lives of a variety of characters become entangled: Kandinsky, the mythic leader of a group of hackers fighting the government and transnational companies; Albert, the founder of the Black Chamber, a state security firm charged with deciphering the secret codes used in the information war; and Miguel “Turing” Sáenz, the Black Chamber’s most famous codebreaker, who begins to suspect his work is not as innocent as he once supposed. All converge to create a “propulsive” novel about personal responsibility and complicity in a world defined by the ever-increasing gulfs between the global and the local, government and society, the virtual and the real (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Turing’s Delirium “combines the excitement of a political thriller with the intellectual ambition of a literary novel” (San Francisco Chronicle). “If William Gibson were a Bolivian, this might be the kind of novel he’d be writing.” —Chicago Tribune




The Matter of Desire


Book Description

“A Bolivian professor probes the depths of his rebel father’s past in this taut, gritty tale of two dramatically different Americas” (Booklist). The Matter of Desire is the story of Pedro, a Bolivian-American political scientist who teaches at a university in upstate New York. Having become entangled in an erotically charged romance with Ashley, a beautiful red-headed graduate student, he returns to Bolivia to seek answers to his own life by investigating the mysteries of his father’s past. Trapped between two cultures, Pedro ultimately finds himself in an existential dilemma of tragic dimensions. The Matter of Desire combines elements of the political thriller and the family mystery with a torrid illicit love affair and brilliantly elucidates the complex relationship between Latin America and the United States. Praise for The Matter of Desire “South American politics meet Northeast academia in this . . . affecting novel about untangling a family past.” —Publishers Weekly




The Delirium Brief


Book Description

*2018 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST FANTASY NOVEL CATEGORY* “Smart, literate, funny.” —Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians Someone is dead set to air the spy agency’s dirty laundry in The Delirium Brief, the next installment to Charles Stross’ Hugo Award-winning comedic dark fantasy Laundry Files series! Bob Howard’s career in the Laundry, the secret British government agency dedicated to protecting the world from unspeakable horrors from beyond spacetime, has entailed high combat, brilliant hacking, ancient magic, and combat with indescribably repellent creatures of pure evil. It has also involved a wearying amount of paperwork and office politics, and his expense reports are still a mess. Now, following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness, the Laundry’s existence has become public, and Bob is being trotted out on TV to answer pointed questions about elven asylum seekers. What neither Bob nor his managers have foreseen is that their organization has earned the attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a British government looking for public services to privatize. Inch by inch, Bob Howard and his managers are forced to consider the truly unthinkable: a coup against the British government itself. Laundry Files 1. The Atrocity Archives 2. The Jennifer Morgue 3. The Fuller Memorandum 4. The Apocalypse Codex 5. The Rhesus Chart 6. The Annihilation Score 7. The Nightmare Stacks At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




American Visa


Book Description

Armed with fake papers, a handful of gold nuggets and a snazzy custom-made suit, an unemployed schoolteacher with a singular passion for detective fiction sets out from small-town Bolivia on a desperate quest for an American visa - his best hope for escaping his painful past and reuniting with his grown son in Miami. American Visa is beautifully written, atmospheric, and stylish in the manner of Chandler ... a smart, exotic crime fiction offering.' - George Pelecanos, author of The Night Gardener'




The Turing Guide


Book Description

Alan Turing has long proved a subject of fascination, but following the centenary of his birth in 2012, the code-breaker, computer pioneer, mathematician (and much more) has become even more celebrated with much media coverage, and several meetings, conferences and books raising public awareness of Turing's life and work. This volume will bring together contributions from some of the leading experts on Alan Turing to create a comprehensive guide to Turing that will serve as a useful resource for researchers in the area as well as the increasingly interested general reader. The book will cover aspects of Turing's life and the wide range of his intellectual activities, including mathematics, code-breaking, computer science, logic, artificial intelligence and mathematical biology, as well as his subsequent influence.




The Annotated Turing


Book Description

Programming Legend Charles Petzold unlocks the secrets of the extraordinary and prescient 1936 paper by Alan M. Turing Mathematician Alan Turing invented an imaginary computer known as the Turing Machine; in an age before computers, he explored the concept of what it meant to be computable, creating the field of computability theory in the process, a foundation of present-day computer programming. The book expands Turing’s original 36-page paper with additional background chapters and extensive annotations; the author elaborates on and clarifies many of Turing’s statements, making the original difficult-to-read document accessible to present day programmers, computer science majors, math geeks, and others. Interwoven into the narrative are the highlights of Turing’s own life: his years at Cambridge and Princeton, his secret work in cryptanalysis during World War II, his involvement in seminal computer projects, his speculations about artificial intelligence, his arrest and prosecution for the crime of "gross indecency," and his early death by apparent suicide at the age of 41.




Contemporary World Fiction


Book Description

This much-needed guide to translated literature offers readers the opportunity to hear from, learn about, and perhaps better understand our shrinking world from the perspective of insiders from many cultures and traditions. In a globalized world, knowledge about non-North American societies and cultures is a must. Contemporary World Fiction: A Guide to Literature in Translation provides an overview of the tremendous range and scope of translated world fiction available in English. In so doing, it will help readers get a sense of the vast world beyond North America that is conveyed by fiction titles from dozens of countries and language traditions. Within the guide, approximately 1,000 contemporary non-English-language fiction titles are fully annotated and thousands of others are listed. Organization is primarily by language, as language often reflects cultural cohesion better than national borders or geographies, but also by country and culture. In addition to contemporary titles, each chapter features a brief overview of earlier translated fiction from the group. The guide also provides in-depth bibliographic essays for each chapter that will enable librarians and library users to further explore the literature of numerous languages and cultural traditions.




Latino Literature


Book Description

Offers a comprehensive overview of the most important authors, movements, genres, and historical turning points in Latino literature. More than 60 million Latinos currently live in the United States. Yet contributions from writers who trace their heritage to the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Mexico have and continue to be overlooked by critics and general audiences alike. Latino Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students gathers the best from these authors and presents them to readers in an informed and accessible way. Intended to be a useful resource for students, this volume introduces the key figures and genres central to Latino literature. Entries are written by prominent and emerging scholars and are comprehensive in their coverage of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Different critical approaches inform and interpret the myriad complexities of Latino literary production over the last several hundred years. Finally, detailed historical and cultural accounts of Latino diasporas also enrich readers' understandings of the writings that have and continue to be influenced by changes in cultural geography, providing readers with the information they need to appreciate a body of work that will continue to flourish in and alongside Latino communities.




A Nervous Splendor


Book Description

A National Book Award Finalist A "riveting" (New York Times) look at one year of Viennese life during the twilight of an empire On January 30, 1889, at the champagne-splashed hight of the Viennese Carnival, the handsome and charming Crown Prince Rudolf fired a revolver at his teenaged mistress and then himself. The two shots that rang out at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods echo still. Frederic Morton, author of the bestselling Rothschilds, deftly tells the haunting story of the Prince and his city, where, in the span of only ten months, "the Western dream started to go wrong." In Rudolf's Vienna moved other young men with striking intellectual and artistic talents—and all as frustrated as the Prince. Among them were: young Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, Gustav Klimt, and the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, whose La Ronde was the great erotic drama of the fin de siecle. Morton studies these and other gifted young men, interweaving their fates with that of the doomed Prince and the entire city through to the eve of Easter, just after Rudolf's body is lowered into its permanent sarcophagus and a son named Adolf Hitler is born to Frau Klara Hitler.