New Release Books by Giovanni Vignale

Suspended in space and time, the characters of these plays are pure abstractions, speaking devices, neither alive nor dead, in fact, not even human. The collection begins with the otherworldly lyrical "Denshosha"-a tribute to the nameless victims of self-righteous violence-and continues with the mounting drama "The Lover", where desperate desire crashes against the boundaries of the possible. These two plays share a Japanese lineage complete with chorus, music, and cruelty. The sense of humor escalates in the dark farce "How to Drive a Cop Crazy", an inverse Kafka story in which, exceptionally, the authority loses, and culminates in the fierce absurdism of the title play, where any semblance of plausibility is lost. Odradek and Billy Bass-two human artifacts who happen to be the only survivors of the apocalypse, promptly begin to rewrite history casting themselves as the new masters of the universe.

The realm of theoretical physics is teeming with abstract and beautiful concepts. And the task of imagining them is one that demands profound creativity, argues Giovanni Vignale. Explaining them is curiously akin to the craft of poets, or magical realist novelists such as Borges, and Musil, or Bulgakov''s The Master and Margarita. In this unusual and sometimes poetic book, Vignale presents his own unorthodox accounts of fundamental theoretical concepts such as Newtonian mechanics, superconductivity, and Einstein''s theory of relativity, showing that what may seem at first quite simple in fact turns out to be much more profound. As we delve behind now-familiar metaphors such as ''electron spin'' and ''black hole'', the world that we take for granted melts away, leaving a glimpse of something much stranger.

Comprehensive graduate text on subject of importance in condensed matter physics, electrical engineering and quantum chemistry.