The Weight of Numbers - Softcover

Ings, Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802170307 ISBN 13: 9780802170309

Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat, 2007

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

"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

From the Author

For more details on this and other projects, please visit simonings.com

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802170307
• ISBN 13: 9780802170309
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432