The Allure of the Absolutes
In a new collection of essays, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, Memphis native and acclaimed novelist Alan Lightman seeks to reconcile the material and the mystical.
Alan Lightman
One Big Story
In Screening Room, Alan Lightman—poet, novelist, and playwright—tells the story of his growing-up years in Memphis during the 1950s and ‘60s. The book centers on the family legacy of Lightman’s grandfather, a movie-palace magnate, but it is also wholly the story of Lightman himself as he struggles to understand his own place as a white, Jewish man in the segregated South.
The Insensible Power of Nature
April 2, 2014 Alan Lightman is the highly acclaimed author of plays, poems, novels, and essays—and he’s working on a memoir about his Memphis childhood—so it is not surprising that the recent run of calamitous weather would inspire him to write a literary meditation on the relationship between human beings and the natural world.
The Known and the Unknown
February 3, 2013 Writer, physicist, teacher, and philanthropist Alan Lightman is best known for his novels, including the widely acclaimed Einstein’s Dreams, but in his new collection of essays, The Accidental Universe, he sets fiction aside to confront head-on some of the big questions about reason, faith, and our place in the cosmos. Lightman will appear at Rhodes College in Memphis on February 6, 2014, at 7:30 p.m. and at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on February 7, 2014, at 5:30 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.
Light at the End of the Tunnel
January 7, 2013 M.I.T. professor, astrophysicist, and New York Times-bestselling author Alan Lightman recently spoke to Inside Higher Ed, about the Harpswell Foundation, an organization he founded in 2003 to provide housing and leadership training to young women in Cambodia. The school’s first dorm and training center opened in 2006; a second followed in 2009.
God as an Interesting Character
December 12, 2012 In his most recent book, Mr g: A Novel About the Creation, Memphis native Alan Lightman takes on the ultimate questions of mind and spirit, writing a twenty-first-century creation story which features a God who works within the laws of physics. He answers questions from Chapter 16 about the genesis of the book, and he shares his thoughts on the troubling cultural rift between science and religion.
