The Fourth State of Matter
By Jo Ann Beard
1996
First Published
4.64
Average Rating
300
Number of Pages
Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” was originally published in the print edition of The New Yorker on June 17, 1996. “The Fourth State of Matter” is a piece of creative nonfiction in the braided essay format focused on grief, loss, and shock due to proximity to the 1991 University of Iowa shooting in the space-physics department, where the author, Jo Ann Beard, worked as an editor for the department’s space-physics monthly publication. The essay probes and investigates the violent shooting perpetrated by Gang Lu, a disgruntled physics student in the department, against five colleagues before Lu died by suicide.
Avg Rating
4.64
Number of Ratings
264
5 STARS
72%
4 STARS
21%
3 STARS
5%
2 STARS
1%
1 STARS
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Author
Jo Ann Beard
Author · 6 books
Jo Ann Beard is the author of a collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
