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The Weight of Numbers
The Weight of Numbers describes the metamorphosis of three people: Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the beauty of numbers; Saul Cogan, transformed from prankster idealist to trafficker in the poor and dispossessed; and Stacey Chavez, ex-teenage celebrity and mediocre performance artist, hungry for fame and starved of love. All are haunted by Nick Jinks, a malevolent curse of a man who seems to be everywhere at once. As a grid of connections emerge between a dusty philosophical society in London and an African revolution, between international container shipping and celebrity-hosted exposés on the problems of the Third World--this novel sends the specters of the Baby Boom's liberal revolutions floating into the unreal estate of globalization and media overload--with a deadly payoff.The Weight of Numbers is an artful and deadly novel that traces the secret histories and paranoid fantasies of our culture into a future globalized in ways both liberating and hideous, full of information and empty of meaning. Simon Ings has delivered a storytelling tour de force that will alter some of your most cherished beliefs.
Book Details
- Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
- Publish Date: Feb 21st, 2007
- Pages: 432
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.16in - 5.78in - 1.10in - 1.08lb
- EAN: 9780802170309
- Categories: • Literary• Historical - General• Political
More books by Simon Ings
Praise for this book
"One of the most exciting--and relevant--books of the last year. Booker material, for sure."
"A Scheherazade of a novel, executed with scope, daring, and humor. The Weight of Numbers is unerringly well written, and engrossing to the last page." -- Lionel Shriver
"Ings weaves an ingenious, shimmering web of contiguity and chance.... A feat of meticulous plotting ... Ings's project is not dissimilar from David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, with which it has been compared." -- Alistair Sooke
"A truly networked work of fiction ... In the corner of the literary landscape in which a few of us sit, hunting for ways to work ever exciting and dynamic thinking from the sciences into the contemporary novel, The Weight of Numbers is extremely good news. It's a dynamic, innovative, and compelling book that brings into focus some of the most interesting trends in contemporary fiction." -- James Flint
"Like Don DeLillo's Underworld, Simon Ings's remarkable new work delivers nothing less than a secret key, a counterhistory, of the last sixty years. Ings's fiction is vivid and swift, a thing of scenes and people, smugglers and astronauts, spies and revolutionaries. But beyond the topical excitements lies something even grander--a vision of our culture a death ship. The Weight of Numbers is amazing." -- Mark Costello
"Dazzling, admirable narrative nerve ... Ings stalks his targets with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter, until he arrives at a new heart of darkness.... As the story cuts through time its lineage emerges: from the colonial excursions of Conrad and Celine to the anthropological objectivity of J. G. Ballard; to Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon; to the askance mix of fact and fiction in DeLillo.... It is unlikely there will be a finer-written fiction this year." -- Chris Pettit