"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