From Publishers Weekly
Scholz, author of the fascinating fictional expos‚ of the defense industry Radiance, demonstrates an equally nimble imagination in delineating the lives of woeful scientists, artists and madmen in this cerebral collection of 12 stories. The first piece, now almost unbearably poignant, is "The Eve of the Last Apollo," in which the first man to walk on the moon, John Andrews, finds his world gradually disintegrating by 1975 as NASA ceases being interested in lunar exploration and Andrews's scornful wife deserts him for a back-to-nature lover. A middle-aged narrator disenchanted by academic and scientific failures and blunted emotionally reappears in several other stories, such as the darkly ambiguous "Menagerie of Babel," where the jaded narrator living in a communal Berkeley, Calif., house recognizes in the person of the idiot-savant painter Murphy his rarefied theories of genetics and Darwinian competition. Occasionally, these narrators veer toward the solipsistic, such as the science writer of "Invisible Ink," who mouths "the bogus pomp of the pseudoseer." Most successful are the tales that achieve a marvelous synthesis of historical and present-day currents, such as the title story, in which the disparate lives of three insurance salesmen (one of them Franz Kafka) collide in a resoundingly modernistic fashion at the a 1920s Conference of International Insurance Executives in Prague. The affecting "Altamira" finds art historian Bernard Vogel traveling back in time to occupy the body of a master in Jan Van Eyck's 15th-century studio. Most of the stories were published in sci-fi magazines, and a few of them, such as the defiantly unchronological "A Draft of Canto CI," peter out into phenomenological obscurantism. Overall, however, these are superbly crafted pieces, and Scholz proves once again he is a writer of alluring intellectual depth and subtlety.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Scholz is also fascinated by science's influence on the psyche and the world at-large. The author of a scorching novel about the nuclear weapons industry, Radiance (2001), Scholz turns out to be an inventive and philosophical short story writer. In "A Catastrophe Machine," a lonely prodigy becomes obsessed with a "mathematics of loss," and in "The Menagerie of Babel," a beleagured biologist befriends an outsider artist and recognizes that they're both appalled by life's monstrous fecundity. In other tales, Marco Polo, now a "wavefront," or surge of consciousness, converses with a computer; a twentieth-century art historian enters a painting by Jan Van Eyck, and an insurance convention brings Kafka, Wallace Stevens, and Charles Ives together in Prague. In each keenly metaphysical fable, Scholz, a connoisseur of the imagination, parses the languages of science, literature, art, and music as he ponders the quintessentially human habit of telling stories, a valiant attempt to render sense out of the delirium of existence. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Freakishly gifted...surreally brilliant." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Roves fearlessly to the outermost reaches of our ability to understand...not just intellectually provocative but emotionally rich, even saturated." --The Washington Post Book World

"Concise, rhythmic language...Italo Calvino, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace come to mind...Scholz weaves the analytical, the literal, the literary, the imaginary, and the emotional."--The Boston Globe

"These are superbly crafted pieces, and Scholz proves once again he is a writer of alluring intellectual depth and subtlety." --Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Shows science to be the perfect speedball." --The New York Times Book Review


Book Description
From the author of Radiance, a dazzling and unhinging collection of his finest stories

In this collection of twelve stories, Carter Scholz, author of the critically acclaimed novel Radiance and co-author (with Jonathan Lethem) of Kafka Americana, reveals his truly remarkable range and prodigious narrative gifts. Traveling from the surface of the moon to the New Jersey suburbs, from Jan Van Eyck’s “invention” of oil painting to the aged Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, from Galileo’s telescope to a theory of catastrophes, they explore the places in the human mind where science and fiction merge. In the same manner as the later works of Nabokov or the fictive universes of Calvino, Kafka, and Borges, Scholz’s stories disturb the universe, probe the worlds we call home, and measure the degrees of our alienation. Mind-expanding, entertaining, and often richly disquieting, The Amount to Carry brings us bravura performances of the imagination.


About the Author
Carter Scholz is the author of Radiance and co-author of Kafka Americana. He lives in Berkeley, California.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Carter Scholz's Fiction Transports Us -- from the moon's surface to a New Jersey suburb, from fifteenth-century Holland to a ramshackle house in contemporary Berkeley. The twelve stories in this new collection from the author of the acclaimed novel Radiance and the coauthor (with Jonathan Lethem) of Kafka Americana are acts of narrative daring and imaginative reach.

Scholz's stories swing on the hinges between minds, worlds, dimensions. "The wavefront identified itself as Marco Polo" begins "Travels," in which the man credited with bridging East and West engages in a spirited discussion with a computer. "The Nine Billion Names of God" provides a hilarious and increasingly mad exchange of letters between the editor of a science fiction magazine and his worst nightmare, a writer named Carter Scholz. The narrator of "A Catastrophe Machine" informs us that catastrophes happen when "steady change" suddenly creates "abrupt effects," and goes on unswervingly to devote his life to studying these events, waiting, patiently waiting, for something to happen in his own life. And in "The Amount to Carry," in a historical and artistic convergence as startling as it seems so perfectly natural and inevitable, Franz Kafka, Wallace Stevens, and Charles Ives meet in a hotel during a business conference. These stories, these dazzling intersections of steady change and abrupt effect, will disturb and delight the reader. Reminiscent of the works of Calvino and Borges, they shake the cosmos for grand effect, then pause to consider the magnificent complexity of the purely ordinary. They are masterful performances by a writer paying homage to the wonders of creation.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Scholz, author of the fascinating fictional expos of the defense industry Radiance, demonstrates an equally nimble imagination in delineating the lives of woeful scientists, artists and madmen in this cerebral collection of 12 stories. The first piece, now almost unbearably poignant, is "The Eve of the Last Apollo," in which the first man to walk on the moon, John Andrews, finds his world gradually disintegrating by 1975 as NASA ceases being interested in lunar exploration and Andrews's scornful wife deserts him for a back-to-nature lover. A middle-aged narrator disenchanted by academic and scientific failures and blunted emotionally reappears in several other stories, such as the darkly ambiguous "Menagerie of Babel," where the jaded narrator living in a communal Berkeley, Calif., house recognizes in the person of the idiot-savant painter Murphy his rarefied theories of genetics and Darwinian competition. Occasionally, these narrators veer toward the solipsistic, such as the science writer of "Invisible Ink," who mouths "the bogus pomp of the pseudoseer." Most successful are the tales that achieve a marvelous synthesis of historical and present-day currents, such as the title story, in which the disparate lives of three insurance salesmen (one of them Franz Kafka) collide in a resoundingly modernistic fashion at the a 1920s Conference of International Insurance Executives in Prague. The affecting "Altamira" finds art historian Bernard Vogel traveling back in time to occupy the body of a master in Jan Van Eyck's 15th-century studio. Most of the stories were published in sci-fi magazines, and a few of them, such as the defiantly unchronological "A Draft of Canto CI," peter out into phenomenological obscurantism. Overall, however, these are superbly crafted pieces, and Scholz proves once again he is a writer of alluring intellectual depth and subtlety. 4-city author tour. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews