Preface
It's been fifteen years since I wrote this novel and I've come to love it more and more over the years. Though I have come to be known for other works, in many ways I think it is the best fiction I've ever written. It is not a hypertext, and yet like my other print fictions I think it has the narrative qualities which led to my hypertext fiction.
It is in fact a print instance of what I've called multiple fictions, a woven polylogue of voices as if along a river or in memory or a baseball stadium.
For awhile it kept threatening to be published but something always seemed to happen. In one case a press went out of business just as it was about to be acquired; in another an editor who told me she could recite the first page by heart moved on and away from literary things; and so on.
As I noted above, this isn't a hypertext. But since I am distributing it in the slightly hypertextual medium of the world-wide-web, I have at least added a slightly hypertextual list of chapters.
This novel is dedicated to the memory of a great baseball writer and poet, my friend Joel Oppenheimer. It is also dedicated to my brother Tom who is quite alive and who always believed that Emma was the girl from Ipenema.
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