Лучшие книги Джозефа Макэлроя

«Плюс» (1977) — пятый роман Джозефа Макэлроя, одного из крупнейших писателей послевоенной литературы США, «Мистера Бескомпромиссного», как его назвал критик Эндрю Эссекс (в первую очередь из-за опус магнум автора, 1192-страничного романа «Женщины и мужчины»). Предыстория сюжета в «Плюсе», как её можно восстановить, такова: инженер, у которого после радиоактивного облучения выявляют рак, решается принять участие в эксперименте — Операции «Travel Light». Его отделённый от тела мозг в капсуле Имп (Исследовательская межпланетная платформа) с названием «Плюс» отправляют на орбиту Земли для проведения экспериментов, связанных с влиянием…

Під час війни в Іраку військові знаходять загадкові Сувої, у яких міститься доєвангельська бесіда Ісуса про цінності вільного ринку, і намагаються переслати їх мережею горизонтальних колодязів під палацем Саддама Хусейна, проте несподівана поява постаті на трампліні та вибух змінюють їхні плани... Найновіший роман видатного американського письменника Джозефа Макелроя – це історія, що об’єднує колишнього пірнальника, а тепер фотографа Зака і таємничого та дуже гладкого Умо, який майстерно стрибає «бомбочкою»; Південну Каліфорнію й Азію; любов і конкуренцію; політику і спорт.

Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fugue like and field like densities of late-twentieth-century life. McElroy rests a global vision on two…

A very tall man resumes his search for a kidnaped child long after the unsolved case has been officially closed. Hind dropped his search when he married. Now, some years later, at the instant the novel opens, he is leaving his apartment to visit his estranged wife Sylvia and his five-year-old daughter May; he wants to live with them. But at his door is a strange old woman, and in his mailbox a note beckoning him toward the old trail. Hind’s renewed quest leads him among people in their spring and early-summer landscape – a city pier; the well-fenced office complex of a famous firm; a New England golf course and the owner’s house overlooking…

"A Smuggler's Bible is the novel that launched the career of one of the most daring and original writers of modern fiction. Driven by despairs as terrible as they are comic, David Brooke sets out to "project" himself into the lives of other people. One may wonder what ties connect the figures whose diverse experiences are conjured up by Brooke's uncanny necromancy, what are the sad or bizarre or lunatic strands that draw together characters as disparate as the endearing monster Duke Amerchrome, the controlled Oxonian Harry Tindall, reserved English bookseller Peter St. John, and Brooke's own detached father, among others. Gradually there emerges an intricate and fascinating pattern of meaning, at the heart of which lies a single metaphor that in a thousand ways tells us who we are.

With "Lookout Cartridge," Joseph McElroy established a reputation as one of contemporary fiction's foremost innovators and deft observers into the fissures of modern society. It is a novel of dazzling intricacy, absorbing suspense, and the highest ambition: to redeem the great claim of paranoia on the American psyche. In trying to figure out just who is so threatened by an innocent piece of cinema verité filmed in collaboration with a friend, Cartwright finds himself at the heart of a mystery stretching from New York and London to Corsica and Stonehenge. With each new fact he gathers, both the intricacy of the syndicate arrayed against…

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.

Joseph McElroy began his distinguished career in 1966, with "A Smuggler's Bible," hailed in "The New York Times" as a novel of "daring, range, and brilliant subtlety . . . to ignore it would be as shameful an act of blind self-deprivation as that which so many of us performed when "The Recognitions" and "Under the Volcano" were first published." "Actress in the House" is his eighth novel-his first in twelve years-a provocative and imaginative work that explores the mysterious interaction of memory, abuse, love, and violence.
Struck in the face, the actress on stage is staggered but doesn't fall. She gazes into the audience, staring with bloody nose at the middle-aged man in the eighth row of this obscure downtown warehouse theater who is drawn in by this violence unmistakably over the line. Daley has never set eyes on this actress before, yet is not entirely unacquainted with her either. Almost against his will, her life will invade his, her efforts to break free of those who have tried to control her, and worse.
As Becca and Daley begin the uncertain process of discovering one another, talking surprisingly, absorbingly, with a humor and uncanny closeness on the night streets of mid-1990s New York, they slowly unearth the events-both past and present-that have brought them together and may tear them apart.

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. This narrative which at first seems beamed from the narrator’s fear that he may have helped cause Dom’s supposed suicide, opens into the violent geography of Dom’s career as late-Sixties activist-ideologue. It is in one of Dom’s ideas — the physicist’s field-state turned into the psychic space of human community — that the narrator…