Exponential


by Joseph McElroy

Edition History
:

(as yet only in the Italian edition forthcoming 2003)

Contents

1. Attractions Around Mt. St. Helens (1997)

2. Still Holding with Apollo 17 (1973)     (newly incorporating also review of Henry S.F.Cooper Jr., 13: The  Flight  that  Failed  [New York Times Book Review, 1973], & essay on Skylab 1, 1973)

3. Neural Neighborhoods and Other Concrete Abstracts (1975)

4. Fiction a Field of Growth: Science at Heart: Action at a Distance (1994)

5. 9/11 Emerging (2002)

6. Seven books:

      Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture (For the Love of Books, 1999)

      Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (New York Times Book Review, 1974)       

      Uwe Johnson, The Third Book About Achim (The New Leader, 1967)

       Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones (The New York Times Book Review, 1972)

       J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (The Nation, 2000),

       Alistair Graham, Eyelids of Morning: The Mingled Destinies of  Crocodiles  and Men   (The New York Times Book Review, 1974)

       Joy Williams, Ill Nature (The Nation, 2001)

7. Socrates on the Beach: Thought and Thing (2002)

8. Singular Planet: Plural Imagination (1990)

          (Speech at International Writers Congress, Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Oct. 20, 1990)

From the author’s Foreword

This book began with an all but unwritten essay in response to the September 11th attack, its continuing impact in my neighborhood and in my effort to rethink a kind of life which would seem to make something of the experience. The book began also with the encouragement of Alfredo Salsano, at Bollati Boringhieri, and of my friend Daniela Daniele. Without her the book might not have happened. The essay "9/11 Emerging" became a prospect that at once gathered to itself several of my essays published over the years that clearly go with it.

"9/11 Emerging" remembers in me our blessed and blasted environments, technology’s mixed futures, the sciences that enrich our contemplation, to say nothing of the heterogeneous American language that is the ground of my thinking and my fictions. In the title Exponential, I mean to suggest powers unchecked and at the same time their comprehension. ...