[3] Dzanc also prepared a fourth limited special printing as a two-volume clothbound hardcover, released in 2021.

[4] As of June 2024, the only existing translation of the novel is an Italian version by Andrew Tanzi, published by Il Saggiatore in 2021.

The chapters with all lowercase titles are, in essence, independent short stories about characters in the novel, so can be read and appreciated separately from the rest of the novel.

They tell of a future time when a certain naturally found alloy turns out to have special teleportation powers, and is used to send two people out to the Earth-Moon libration points, where they become merged (without prior knowledge) into one.

[1][Note 3] In the words of Frederick Karl, the breathers "are attempts to break away from historical narrative into simultaneity.

"[2] Sections in all-caps that do not include the word "BREATHER" and those with titles in normal title-case are mostly straightforward narrations, but they are intricately plotted and intimately related to the more difficult portions.

There is a MacGuffin in the guise of a never-performed opera Hamletin based on Hamlet by a Chilean woman, the mother of the zoologist Mena.

Often, multiple plotlines are advanced nearly simultaneously, in long rushing sentences that refer to minor details across the decades and centuries.

Marion Hugh Mayne founds the Windrow Democrat as an advocacy newspaper for Andrew Jackson, and writes a diary.

Jones publishes his first article on locoweed classification "Guide to Western Biology"[WM 4] Margaret goes west with Florence, fellow Windrow girl, to the Chicago World's Fair, reporting for the family newspaper.

After the Fair, they traveled together, but when visiting a slaughterhouse, Florence got sick and returned home, while Margaret continued to tour the West, including Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.

But Jim suddenly finds himself frozen, stuck at an impossible "extragravitational" angle, giving Brad time to get away.

[WM 8] Pearl Myles, Jim's journalist teacher, assigns the class "an imaginary news story".

He meets Dina West, an Albuquerque-based environmentalist, and Ray Vigil, a Navajo supporter of local geothermal energy, which Jim explains is impossible.

Jean is doubtful, suggesting the idea of torus-shaped space stations hadn't yet made it into the science fiction magazines of his youth.

[WM 19] The Hamletin dress rehearsal is performed, with McKenna, Clara, de Talca, Mayn, Jean, Grace, Maureen in attendance.

Sarah had an affair with neighbor Bob Yard, who is apparently the father of Brad, Jim's younger brother.

Ray is at first an irritant to Jim, a smarmy journalist who usually just passes off press releases as news and who likes using information he unearths for personal gain.

Larry's friend Donald "D. D." Dooley uses class time to challenge the professor on the role of classical economics in the contemporary world.

The first edition, first printing, referred to these excerpts as "poems", McElroy's own term,[1] and mentioned some of the journals where they had appeared.

The second printing more neutrally referred to them as "parts," and gave the complete list of literary journals, in addition to mention of the separate publication of the Ship Rock chapter as a limited edition chapbook.

In a 1979 Chicago Review interview (republished in expanded form in Anything Can Happen), writer Tom LeClair wrote that McElroy acknowledged rereading, intimating he was influenced by, Marx, Keynes, Schumacher, and Veblen while writing Women and Men.

In the published book, first edition, second printing, the author acknowledges that he "meditated" on E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, especially the phrase "an articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units", which is echoed repeatedly throughout the novel.

In this extraordinary, multilayered novel of crisis and yearning, Joseph McElroy illuminates with tenderness male and female union and apartness.

The high water mark of a distinguished career--a powerful achievement.I was filled with awe and wonder as the immense, epic design of the novel continued to mushroom ever higher...this book is a humbling experience.

... Women and Men is baffling much of the time, but I couldn't help feeling while reading the first Breather section that this is what fiction in the twenty-first century might look like...one closes this extraordinary novel with the conviction that McElroy is fifty years ahead of anyone else now writing.Women and Men belongs to the maximalist subspecies of postmodern novel.For me, by the close, it was like having listened for several days to an all-news station in a foreign language: you have a rough idea of what's been going on, the news is worse than you imagine, and, while you feel more or less informed, you can't really say that you've enjoyed yourself.

But one does not go to this novelist for the usual pleasures.The following articles appeared in the Joseph McElroy issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction (1990):