Best known for his complex and beautiful novels—regularly compared to those of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo—Joseph McElroy is equally at home in the short story, having written numerous pieces over the course of his career that now, collected at last, serve as an ideal introduction to one of the most important contemporary American authors. Combining elements of classic McElroy with tantalizing stories pointing the way ahead (the spare and dangerous "No Man's Land," the ...

Author of nine previous novels, including four available through Dzanc Books in print and seven available electronicallyAuthor received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and D.H. Lawrence Foundations, twice from Ingram Merrill and twice from the National Endowment for the Arts.Author has a strong network among universities, including Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, University of New...

Preparations for Search was a section removed from the classic Women and Men that stands alone as a great short work of fiction.

Celebrates and illuminates the legacy of one of America’s most innovative and consequential 20th century novelistsIn 2002, following the posthumous publication of William Gaddis’s collected nonfiction and his final novel and Jonathan Franzen’s lengthy attack on him in The New Yorker, a number of partisan articles appeared in support of Gaddis’s legacy. In a review in The London Review of Books, critic Hal Foster suggested a reason for disparate responses t...

An uninvited guest, entering the empty New York apartment of a man known to intimates as "Dom," proceeds to write for his absent host a curious confession. Its close accounts of friendship since boyhood with two men surely unknown to Dom and certainly to each other is interleaved with the story of Dom himself.Ancient History is one of the only novels by Joseph McElroy to not have been re-issued in paperback, coming out alongside his new novel after a year-long re-introduct...

A brain orbiting the earth in a capsule, its human body gone, its onetime body. A novel written from the point of view of the brain told in the 3rd person close up - too close for comfort. A brain that has been surgically divorced and lifted out of that body that had been terminally ill, we will learn - an engineer who had been suffering from radiation and had agreed to be used in a solar experiment - though he is perhaps of hardly more than passing concern in a tale whose growing is here ...

It is a novel of dazzling intricacy, absorbing suspense, and the highest ambition: to redeem the great claim of paranoia on the American psyche.

"Since 1966, McElroy's novels have astonished and delighted by their brilliant wit, intelligence, and style."-Washington Post Book World"McElroy is rightly compared with Gaddis and Pynchon."-Harper's MagazineThe Iraq War, two platform divers, a California family, and within that family an intimacy that open the larger stories more deeply still. Cannonball continues in Joseph McElroy's tradition of intricately woven story lines.Jose...

The movements of life and the pauses in between are revealed in this short narrative. From the perspective of a single man,neither hero nor villain; he is like us. His story doesn't begin here and even with his last words his story continues beyond the words THE END. But this short blurb is enough for now. In this post-apocalyptic short are the revelations, not of humanity, but of a simple man.

• Winner of the BC National Award for Non-Fiction• Nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the 2011 Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Award.During Charlotte Gill’s 20 years working as a tree planter she encountered hundreds of clear-cuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world, a complicated landscape presenting geographic evidence of our appetites. Charged with sowing the new forest...

The Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of The Forever War imagines a future in which most of humanity has abandoned Earth for orbiting man-made habitats.In Worlds, Worlds Apart, and Worlds Enough and Time, Joe Haldeman imagines a near future rife with exhilarating and terrifying possibilities, when hundreds of thousands of human beings have abandoned the Earth's surface to live in man-made ha...

“In science fiction there is only a handful of books that stretch the mind—and this is one of them.”—Arthur C. ClarkeIn a moving story of sacrifice and triumph, human scientists establish a relationship with intelligent lifeforms—the cheela—living on Dragon’s Egg, a neutron star where one Earth hour is equivalent to hundreds of their years. The cheela culturally evolve from savagery to the discovery of science, and for a brief time, men are their diligent teachers....