pro­ cesses-and their stationary distributions. These classical topics are treated with a modem twist: in particular, the coupling technique is introduced in the first chap­ ter and is used throughout. The third chapter deals with continuous time Markov chains-Poisson process, queues, birth and death chains, stationary distributions. The second half of the book treats spatial processes. This is the main difference between this work and the many others on stochastic processes. Spatial stochas­ tic processes are (rightly) known as being difficult to analyze. The few existing books on the subject are technically challenging and intended for a mathemat­ ically sophisticated reader. We picked several interesting models-percolation, cellular automata, branching random walks, contact process on a tree-and con­ centrated on those properties that can be analyzed using elementary methods.