Novels
- The Mind-body Problem (1985)
- The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (1989)
- The Dark Sister (1991)
- Mazel (1995)
- Properties of Light (2000)
- 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (2009)
Collections
- My Mother Loved to Dance (1993)
Non fiction
- Incompleteness (2005)
- Betraying Spinoza (2006)
- Plato at the Googleplex (2014)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Rebecca Goldstein Books Overview
The Dark Sister
The story of the relationship between two sisters Hedda, an intelligent writer of angry feminist novels, and Stella, a woman who has married and divorced several times. Within the novel is Hedda’s own novel in progress of two Victorian sisters: one is a gifted astronomer; both are spinsters; and both may be on the verge of madness. A compelling blend of overlapping stories and unsettling dualities.
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.
Properties of Light
A grand gothic novel of the outer reaches of passion of the body and of the mind Properties of Light is a mesmerizing tale of consuming love and murderous professional envy that carries the reader into the very heart of a physics problem so huge and perplexing it thwarted even Einstein: the nature of light. Caught in the entanglements of erotic and intellectual passion are three physicists: Samuel Mallach is a brilliant theoretician unhinged by the professional glory he feels has been stolen from him; Dana is his intriguing and gifted daughter, whose desperate devotion to her father contributes to the tragic undoing of Justin Childs, her lover and her father’s protege. All three are working together to solve some of the deepest and most controversial problems in quantum mechanics, problems that challenge our understanding of the ‘real world’ and of the nature of time. The book grapples with these elusive mysteries, but at its heart is a fiery love story of startling urgency. Insights into quantum mechanics and relativity theory are attached to the nerve fibers of human emotions, and these connections are alive with poignancy and pathos. For these characters, the passion to know and understand, like the desire for love, is full of terrible risk, holding out possibilities for heartbreak as well as for ecstasy. The true subject of Properties of Light is the ecstatic response to reality, perhaps the only response that can embrace the erotic and the poetic, the scientific and the spiritual. Written with, and about, a rare form of passion, this incandescent novel is fiction at its most daring and utterly original.
36 Arguments for the Existence of God
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.
My Mother Loved to Dance
A collection of seven short stories that explore the labyrinths of consciousness, the fragile mysteries of love, and the forces that like the mathematical notion of ‘strange attractors’ bring a secret order to the chaotic randomness of life.
Incompleteness
A masterly introduction to the life and thought of the man who transformed our conception of math forever. Kurt G del is considered the greatest logician since Aristotle. His monumental theorem of Incompleteness demonstrated that in every formal system of arithmetic there are true statements that nevertheless cannot be proved. The result was an upheaval that spread far beyond mathematics, challenging conceptions of the nature of the mind. Rebecca Goldstein, a MacArthur winning novelist and philosopher, explains the philosophical vision that inspired G del’s mathematics, and reveals the ironic twist that led to radical misinterpretations of his theorems by the trendier intellectual fashions of the day, from positivism to postmodernism. Ironically, both he and his close friend Einstein felt themselves intellectual exiles, even as their work was cited as among the most important in twentieth century thought. For G del , the sense of isolation would have tragic consequences. This lucid and accessible study makes G del’s theorem and its mindbending implications comprehensible to the general reader, while bringing this eccentric, tortured genius and his world to life. About the series:Great Discoveries brings together renowned writers from diverse backgrounds to tell the stories of crucial scientific breakthroughs the great discoveries that have gone on to transform our view of the world.
Betraying Spinoza
In 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza s progeny. In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh and blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza s philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe s first experiment with racial anti Semitism. Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age. From the Hardcover edition.