Alan Lightman Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Picture Books

Publication Order of Best American Science Writing Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Alan Lightman is an American physicist, essayist, novelist, educator, and social entrepreneur.

He was born in 1948 and received his education while at Princeton as well as the California Institute of Technology. There he graduated and received his PhD in the field of theoretical physics. Alan also was able to receive five honorary doctoral degrees.

The author has been able to serve on the faculties of both Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was also the first person at MIT to be able to get dual faculty appointments in both science and the humanities. He is a professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT.

Alan has conducted scientific research in astrophysics that has had to do with everything from relativity theory to radiative processes, black holes, and the dynamics of systems of stars. He has written articles and essays that have been featured in such publications as Harper’s, Granta, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Salon, the New York Review of Books, and other publications. His essays have been frequently selected by the New York Times as belonging to the best essays of the year.

Lightman has written six novels as well as several essay collections, a memoir, and a narrative poem the length of a book, and several scientific books. He wrote the novel Einstein’s Dreams, which was not only an international bestseller but the foundation for dozens of independent theatrical/musical adaptations globally.

His other books have done well, as well. The Diagnosis, a novel of Lightman’s, ended up being a finalist for the National Book Award. The most recent books that Lightman has authored have been The Accidental Universe, selected as one of the 10 best books of 2014 by Brain Pickings, Screening Room, which was picked as one of the best books of the year for 2016 by the Washington Post, and his book Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine.

Lightman is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also founded the Harpswell Foundation, a nonprofit organization with the mission of advancing a new generation of women leaders in Southeast Asia. The author has also been the recipient of the gold medal for humanitarian service by the Cambodian government.

Einstein’s Dreams is a 1993 novel by Alan Lightman. This national bestseller became a classic from the instant it was published and available to read. It looks into the various connections to be made between art and science with the creative process and how fragile the human existence is. It’s what the New York Times refers to as a ‘magical, metaphysical realm’ that it called ‘enchanting, delightful’.

This is a fictional collage of stories that was dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905. They are about physics as well as time and relativity. As the sensitive and defiant young genius is coming up with his theory of relativity, his new conception of time, he is starting to imagine many possible different worlds.

In one of them, time is circular. This means that people are destined to repeat their various failures and triumphs time and time again. In a different one, there exists a place where time is able to stand still, which is visited by lovers and the parents who are clinging to their children. In a different one, time is a bird like a nightingale, often trapped by a bell jar.

Existing in thirty languages and more for the reading public, this book has inspired all types of creative people all over the world. It looks into the connections that exist in art and science together with the creative process and human existence’s fragility in poetic vignettes.

Good Benito is a 1995 novel by Alan Lightman. This is a moving and original book that is frequently funny that is all about the clash that can come between the science absolutes and the vagaries of human experience.

Bennett knew that he would always live a life of science. From homemade rockets to childhood experiments to the complex equations that he would solve as a physics professor, the vision that he has has been able to transform all of the frailty and uncertainty that life holds into a beauty and an order that he is able to inhabit with satisfaction.

However, the vision ends up betraying him when it shows a profound incompleteness, as well as an inadequacy to confront the contradictions in his life, like the black maid who loved him while raising him but cannot have him in her house, or the absent father who wishes he had died a hero in the second world war, or the self-destructive wife who is able to invite in Bennett’s cruelty.

As Bennett tries to find a balance between his intuition and reason, he starts to learn how to let the imperfect things that daily life has to offer exist, and works on broadening the way that he understands the world as well as the place that he occupies in it.

Funny and sad, composed with lyrical sparseness, the story of his struggle becomes a portrait of the emotional life of a scientist as well as a story of the disillusionment that often can haunt us all. Check out Good Benito to absorb every detail of this story!