Preparations For Search


by Joseph McElroy

Edition History
:
With  Preparations for Search Joseph McElroy invents a new literary genre,  Noir-core, where the conventions of noir are flattened and compressed into dense, jet-black space, a gravitational singularity.   
   
Mike Heppner, author of The Egg Code  and
Pike's Folly

Reviews for Preparations For Search

Golden Handcuffs,
"... the text knows what it means to be excised from a former home (Women and Men). Which would mean that the anxious, anguished, coastal drawing on the front is an accurate portrait of the conents of the text, which is coastal in the sense that it constitutes an outline of a shore which is otherwise impossible to measure. Which would mean that Preparations for Search is fractal, or infinitely subdivisible, as McElroy's sentences often are ..."

"... [cut from Women and Men before publication in 1987] Preparations for Search  gives evidence that ...there are unities and ideas of compleion that have nothing to do with length, and which instead make the case that certain material has to go, and yet this material, whether germane to the narrative trajectory of the whole is still somehow, by virtue of the man's style, breathtaking and electrifying, despite the fact that it reveals its vintage in details (telephones, answering machines, an absence of computers), and thus the excision is as invigorating as the most refreshing voice we are likely to encounter in the firmament of the present."

Rick Moody  "On Preparations for Search"