Night Soul and Other Stories (Dalkey Archive)

Acclaimed novelist and short story writer Joseph McElroy will read and sign his latest collection, Night Soul and Other Stories.

"McElroy is ever nimble and probing, and these stories read like intricate puzzles to be patiently pieced through." --Publishers Weekly

"Although his work certainly feeds off late-20th-century energies, McElroy’s cosmopolitan, erudite fiction needs to be received on a wider bandwidth that also registers signals from other disciplines and earlier literature. The sudden shifts between his paragraphs, for instance, recall Braque and Picasso’s collage techniques, while many of his thematic obsessions overlap with those of modernists like Woolf, Bergson and Nietzsche. Reading “Night Soul” — a collection of 12 clever and oblique short stories — is, in fact, a little like being a member of Marlow’s audience in “Heart of Darkness.” We listen in a foggy void, and try to puzzle out the significance of a narrator’s inconclusive experiences." --The New York Times Book Review (full review here)

Joseph McElroy was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930. He is the author of eight novels and has written dozens of stories, essays, and reviews. He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ingram Merrill Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts.

Photo of the author by Peter Chin.

Night Soul and Other Stories (Paperback)

By Joseph McElroy

$14.95

ISBN-13: 9781564786029
Availability: In the Warehouse (Usually ships to store or customer in 2-7 days. Call for time-sensitive orders)
Published: Dalkey Archive Press, 1/2011

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.

---