Inspired by a brother's high school science project--a perpetual motion machine that could save the world-- The Perpetual Motion Machine is a memoir in essays that attempts to save a sibling by depicting the visceral pain that accompanies longing for some past impossibility. The collection has been a science project in its study of memory, in the calculation and plotting of the moments that make up a childhood. The preparation has been "in the field" in that it is built upon the gathering of lived experience; the evidence is photo albums, family interviews, and anecdotes from friends. The project has been one giant experiment--to see if they can all make it out alive.

The deceptively simple task of making a mechanism which would turn forever has fascinated many famous men and physicists throughout the centuries. In fact, the basic tenets of engineering grew from the failures of these perpetual motion machine designers. This work offers an illustrated overview of perpetual motion machines and their inventors.

Bursting with bittersweet nostalgia, a funny, poignant, perfectly voiced debut that captures what it's like to be a teenage girl—“full of brilliantly-rendered awkwardness and the hilarious minor horrors of a privileged adolescence, The Brittanys shimmers with the everyday incandescence of youth” (Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light). They're not the most popular freshmen at their Florida prep school, but at least everyone knows their name(s). The Brittanys. Brittany Rosenberg: drives her golf cart around her subdivision to meet boys. Brittany Gottlieb: insists you can't lose your virginity if you haven't gotten your period. (She heard it somewhere!) Brittany Tomassi: is from New York. Brittany Jensen: once threw her tampon into a stranger's swimming pool. A brash, bold, unapologetic tomboy. And the greatest person in the whole wide world. At least as far as the fifth Brittany--our narrator--is concerned. Even within their friend group, she and Jensen are a duo: with their matching JanSport backpacks, Tiffany chokers, and Victoria's Secret push-up bras, they are unstoppable. And now that they're finally growing up, they're going to do everything: dye their hair, attend no-parent parties, try pot . . . maybe even lose their virginities. 2004 is totally going to be their year! Except Jensen's interests may be diverging from her friends'. And within our narrator's own family--in the lives of her exhausted mother and beloved, genius older brother--life-changing events may be taking shape. Events that only years later, looking back, she has the perspective to see. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

Imprisoned for life aboard a zeppelin that floats high above a fantastic metropolis, greeting-card writer Harold Winslow pens his memoirs. His only companions are the disembodied voice of Miranda Taligent, the only woman he has ever loved, and the cryogenically frozen body of her father, Prospero, the genius and industrial magnate who drove her insane. As Harold heads toward a last desperate confrontation with Prospero to save Miranda's life, he finds himself an unwitting participant in the creation of the greatest invention of them all: the perpetual motion machine. Beautifully written, stunningly imagined, and wickedly funny, Dexter Palmer's The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a heartfelt meditation on the place of love in a world dominated by technology.

Set in southern Ontario in the late nineteenth century, at a time when the machine age was coming into its own, Perpetual Motion chronicles the fortunes of settler Robert Fraser, a man obsessed with power and control. Driven by the idea of inventing a perpetual motion machine which will utilize natural energy, he neglects and destroys not only the nature around him but his own family too, as his overbearing rationality becomes a kind of tragic lunacy. First published in 1982, Perpetual Motion is Graeme Gibson’s superb evocation of a time when faith in material progress is still challenged by superstition and a lingering belief in magic. It is an ironic yet compassionate examination of the painful consequences of human folly.

Mankind is constantly facing different challenges in our dynamically changing world. What we pretty much need is cooperation and alliance to overcome the problems we have to face. Our conflicts of interest and ideological opposition have to be put aside. Without a wide-scale social alliance we will not be able to find the answers to the questions that have properly arisen because of our irresponsible behavior. In the Middle Ages natural resources were so abundantly available that mankind's needs were pretty easily met. We had to do nothing else than to cut out of nature everything we happened to need in a specific moment of time. Mankind snatched the opportunity but did not really chew the cud. They took away what they wanted. Nevertheless, with the onset of the industrial revolution, the rules of the game started to change. The energy output of the machines reached higher and higher levels, but at the same time, the rate of charge they exerted on the environment had also uninterruptedly increased. We opted for an "elegant" solution. We just simply hushed up the problem. For a long time, the protection of the environment had been a disregarded marginal field ignored completely by the political powers. Nevertheless, the environmental catastrophes warned us to take action in a very short while, but the fire extinguishing might have started too late; hence the operation of some of the energy-supplying systems produced an immense economic benefit for several lobby groups. Petrol, natural gas, and other common yet not really efficient sources of energy, which at the same time have had a deleterious influence on the environment, are constantly dwindling away. Fuel prices reach the stars. If we see a temporary price decrease, we take a deep breath. Nonetheless, this is nothing other than the end game. Remarkable changes are to come. If this does not happen or is delayed, a global catastrophe is expected to come. When might this downturn happen? What other sources can replace the petrol? For the moment, no one can answer these questions. Could anyone? According to some thinking the progress of history is not linear but cyclic. Many of the ideas had been born many centuries or even many millenniums ago in the heads of certain persons. Some of them put their ideas even on paper, or others might have built them. Who were they? If someone comes up with an idea that differs pretty much from the ordinary ones of his era, he cannot really be optimistic about a warm welcome. He is looked at as a weirdo at most. In the worst case he is burnt at the stake because of not having accepted the traditions. It is actually not worth going too far. In the past, the ones who were asking too many questions had to face the ecclesiastical or secular powers, whereas today these are replaced by the petroleum lobby. However, the end result is the same, unfortunately: a rented parcel in a quiet graveyard. Documents and experimental utensils are disappearing or are destroyed practically as a routine. Certain academic circles are declaring that "the idea is pure fantasy; this cannot be true because it contradicts the laws of nature!" Of course, they forget to mention what they exactly mean about "laws of nature" since "nature" or "universe" are boundless notions the full comprehension and mapping of which is impossible. Making use of our rules and laws we manage to get access to those parts about which we confidently state that we have managed to understand. Can we, however, talk about real comprehension? All our rules are based on semblances and simplifications. We want to humanize something that is totally independent of us. We overestimate our role. We abuse nature instead of serving it. Some recognized this problem in Hungary and abroad as well.

This powerful and lyrical debut novel is to Syria what The Kite Runner was to Afghanistan; the story of two girls living eight hundred years apart—a modern-day Syrian refugee seeking safety and an adventurous mapmaker’s apprentice—“perfectly aligns with the cultural moment” (The Providence Journal) and “shows how interconnected two supposedly opposing worlds can be” (The New York Times Book Review). This “beguiling” (Seattle Times) and stunning novel begins in the summer of 2011. Nour has just lost her father to cancer, and her mother moves Nour and her sisters from New York City back to Syria to be closer to their family. In order to keep her father’s spirit alive as she adjusts to her new home, Nour tells herself their favorite story—the tale of Rawiya, a twelfth-century girl who disguised herself as a boy in order to apprentice herself to a famous mapmaker. But the Syria Nour’s parents knew is changing, and it isn’t long before the war reaches their quiet Homs neighborhood. When a shell destroys Nour’s house and almost takes her life, she and her family are forced to choose: stay and risk more violence or flee across seven countries of the Middle East and North Africa in search of safety—along the very route Rawiya and her mapmaker took eight hundred years before in their quest to chart the world. As Nour’s family decides to take the risk, their journey becomes more and more dangerous, until they face a choice that could mean the family will be separated forever. Following alternating timelines and a pair of unforgettable heroines coming of age in perilous times, The Map of Salt and Stars is the “magical and heart-wrenching” (Christian Science Monitor) story of one girl telling herself the legend of another and learning that, if you listen to your own voice, some things can never be lost.