Passes Through

"Welcome to the barbwire collection (the limbo between prose and poetry). Stephenson's Passes Through is the most exciting book I've read in some time. I don't know exactly why, but that only makes it more so. It has something to do with his pitch-perfect mastery of the underlying logic of association and his observational eye that sweeps through sex, art, death, and obsession—an obsession that may be love or that may be the desire to kill, or both. Here's a book that succeeds through pure writing to do what only the best fiction does." —Samuel R. Delany, author of Dark Reflections and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

“In this narrative of pure negativity, to ‘pass through’ is to encounter the compulsive hater that may lurk in all of us. Stephenson is compellingly stalked via an accumulation of tiny precise phrases or gestures bespeaking the odd use of heartlessness, the protagonist’s and the culture’s, brilliantly juxtaposed in a stylistically and narratively intriguing work.” —Gail Scott, author of My Paris

"Passes Through is a very stream-of-conscious­ness affair, jumping, sometimes leaping, between thoughts and observations that mirror the way many of us think. It is James Joyce for the twenty-first cen­tury." --American Book Review