Night Soul and Other Stories (American Literature Series)
Joseph McElroy
Language: English
Pages: 293
ISBN: 1564786021
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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 lush and mischievous "The Campaign Trail"), "Night Soul and Other Stories" presents a wide range of work from a monumental artist.
accident taking this route of three or four routes sometimes at night when the city belongs to him, redoing it in his head, his chest, arms, and butt. The end of a difficult evening—and now this guy, one more city sell with some point probably of value offered in the end. Fix your flat but step in here, see what we got goin’ on. Parking his visitor’s bike up against a table-saw this not uninteresting guy who, whoever he was with, didn’t like to be alone. Self-taught veteran you felt, wounded
her information? he asked. “You knew at sixteen, looking at the ceiling.” He’d known nothing. He’d had an aunt who designed for Bucky Fuller, did the architect work actually but no one would ever know. She got no credit. For her ideas? Valerie said. The front door swung shut behind him. He had left her. The elevator in this well-appointed apartment house on its way up, a phone went, if it was hers. Her laugh a moment ago had been like someone else. The Chinese. He belonged to the city. What had
able to mask tires mashing driveway gravel and dirt: and he had heard nothing, he had seen on the great canoe only hands. The canoe attracted others to it, they were in its future. It was not the Mayor making off with the bark canoe or taking a two-by-four to it in the middle of the night. Zanes felt only the silence of four in the morning near him on his way to the bathroom with his clothes. He would risk his wife’s waking, because he and the thief were going to take the canoe out. Some
I said did they have fights? She guessed so, sometimes. And did Val, I asked boringly, mind her mother working? Sometimes, not really. And what was it like having two high-pitched parents? You? she said. Which parents was I talking about? she asked, smiling with one side of her mouth—what’s for dessert? Yogurt on a stick, I said—raspberry. The phone rang, Liz talked to Val. We had dessert, Liz and I. I asked her, What is this topology you study in math? I had become curious. I was more than a
looped over one shoulder, Lang mentioned this guy he was seeing after school. Though then the man could regret not telling Lang he’d be late after Parent-Teacher, divided by the boy, the phone, the face of his wristwatch which the hand, knuckles, fingers beyond it can blindly deny. Bent on asking what he and Flyte discussed; and this friend in an upper grade who wanted to meet Vic?—and the piano across the sunny room; the yellow Post-it with four, five named chords; and these broken rhythms that