Gloria Vollman, Author, William T. Vollmann, Author Pantheon Books $19 (0p) ISBN 978-0-679-40342-5
This brief novel by the gifted Vollmann ( You Bright and Risen Angels ) finds Jimmy, a drifter in San Francisco's Tenderloin demimonde since his discharge from service in Vietnam in the late '60s, struggling with a feminine ideal given the name...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Penguin Books $18 (496p) ISBN 978-0-14-025449-5
Fifty-three interconnected tales mixing travelogue and fiction from the prolific enfant terrible. (June)
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann. Viking, $55 (1376p) ISBN 978-0-670-01598-6
The Nez Perce War of 1877 lies at the center of Vollmann’s epic new novel, the fifth volume in his series Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, and the first since 2001’s Argall. Not surprisingly, given its length, it also offers a...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann. Viking, $36 (704p) ISBN 978-0-670-01597-9
In the note to the reader that opens this huge collection, Vollmann (Europe Central) states, “This is my final book. Any subsequent productions bearing my name will have been composed by a ghost.” Vollmann’s fiction has always defied easy...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Viking Books $29.95 (496p) ISBN 978-0-670-86578-9
Last year could be remembered as a year in which the prolific young Vollmann did not publish a book; early 1996, however, shows that he wasn't sitting on his hands. This massive tome collects ""tales"" and ""snapshots"" of his travels over the past...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Viking Books $22.95 (432p) ISBN 978-0-670-84856-0
The Rifles is the ``sixth dream'' in Vollmann's staggeringly ambitious Seven Dreams sequence, which promised to be an imaginative charting of the European conquest and settling of North America. And it is the third dream to be published (Vollmann is
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Pantheon Books $24 (318p) ISBN 978-0-679-40439-2
The prolific Vollmann has made his career mining two veins: the mytho-history of the settling of North America ( Fathers and Crows ; The Ice-Shirt ) and the dark margins of contemporary life ( Whores for Gloria ; The Rainbow Stories ) . This...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Grove Press $21 (279p) ISBN 978-0-8021-1502-7
The prolific Vollmann weighs in with at least his third hyper-realized meditation on female prostitution. But whereas Whores for Gloria had an imaginative conceit worthy of Borges and Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs teetered provocatively...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Farrar Straus Giroux $22 (268p) ISBN 978-0-374-10105-3
There are no pictures in this picture show but, in the spirit of photography, there are glimpses of a world frozen in time. The prolific young author of five other books is at his most precocious here, recounting his travels in 1982 in Pakistan and...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Viking Books $19.95 (432p) ISBN 978-0-670-83239-2
Continuing with the theme of oppression addressed in You Bright and Risen Angels and The Rainbow Stories , this first of seven projected novels on the exploitation of North America focuses on the Scandinavians. Freely augmenting and interpreting the
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Viking Books $30 (1008p) ISBN 978-0-670-84333-6
Ready or not, we have an Ovid in our midst. In the second installment in his Seven Dream series, the 32-year-old Vollmann shows every sign of being equal to his self-appointed task of creating a ``symbolic history'' of the European settlement of...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Viking Books $40 (672p) ISBN 978-0-670-89167-2
Ambitious in style, in range, and in sheer volume, Vollmann's massive new novel continues the controversial projects of Whores for Gloria and Butterfly Stories, in which the prolific author aims to create a detailed fictional map of a modern-day red-
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Atheneum Books $22.95 (635p) ISBN 978-0-689-11852-4
It's no easy taskby the author's clear intentionto say exactly what's going on and why in this ferociously talented first novel, a comic-surrealistic assault upon reason that should appeal to those who enjoy Thomas Pynchon. The story is an epic brew
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Atheneum Books $19.95 (541p) ISBN 978-0-689-11961-3
This stunning collection consists of 13 knockout stories, ranging in length from a few pages to a short novel, corresponding idiosyncratically to the colors of the spectrum. With an intensity and dexterity previously evinced in You Bright and Risen...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author . Viking $40 (736p) ISBN 978-0-670-91030-4
"Reader Right Honorable; I warn'd you that this Book of mine doth drag me down toward the worst," writes William the Blind, chronicler of this third "dream" of Vollman's projected seven-novel series. The settling of Jamestown,
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Penguin Books $16 (432p) ISBN 978-0-14-017623-0
Set in the 1800s during the exploration of the Northwest Passage, this is the sixth volume in Vollman's epic fictional history about European conquest and settlement in North America. (Apr.)
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Penguin Books $14 (160p) ISBN 978-0-14-023157-1
Vollmann's brief, coy and ultimately unfulfilling novel portrays a Vietnam veteran in San Francisco's Tenderloin demimonde questing for an elusive, idealized woman named Gloria. (Feb.)
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Penguin Books $20 (432p) ISBN 978-0-14-013196-3
Vollman's ambitious seven-part series of postmodern historical novels begins with these two volumes, which focus respectively on encounters between Scandinavians and Native Americans in the first millenium C.E. and on the exploits of the French and...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Penguin Books $22 (560p) ISBN 978-0-14-017154-9
Knockout stories and report age conjure up skinheads, prostitutes and biblical martyrs.from the prodigious Voll man, who has three hardcovers due out this year. Pantheon, Viking, and FSG are brining have forthcoming Vollmann hard covers. (July)
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author Penguin Books $25 (656p) ISBN 978-0-14-011087-6
``The story is an epic brew of technology, magic, politics, history and entomology, by turns fiercely satiric and good-naturedly humorous,'' maintained PW of this ``ferociously talented first novel,'' about (among other things) a pitiless war...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author . Ecco $29.99 (500p) ISBN 978-0-06-122848-3
The performance of female characters by male Noh actors sparks a deeply researched, lovingly detailed, and obsessive discourse on the nature of feminine beauty by award-winning novelist and essayist Vollmann (Imperium
). The book charts an...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author . Viking $55 (1306p) ISBN 978-0-670-02061-4
Signature
Reviewed by
Michael Coffey
This is an exasperating, maddening, exhausting and inchorent book by the stunningly prolific Vollmann, who has really outdone himself. Eleven hundred pages plus endless endnotes about a single county in...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author . Ecco $26.95 (200p) ISBN 978-0-06-125675-2
In this sometimes heavy-handed though brief (especially for Vollmann) memoir of hopping trains and riding the rails, Vollmann, National Book Award winner for Europe Central, explores a personal and national obsession. “From a certain open...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author . Ecco $29.95 (314p) ISBN 978-0-06-087882-5
The varied responses to the question "why are you poor?" fuels this meditation on the nature of poverty by journalist and National Book Award–winning novelist Vollmann (Europe Central
, etc.). The book, structured as a series of...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author . Norton/Atlas $22.95 (294p) ISBN 978-0-393-05969-4
Modern readers are less inclined than earlier ones to sit through Copernicus's juggling of Ptolemy's epicycles to discover how he arrived at his eureka moment that the Earth moves around the Sun. Fortunately, they don't have to, as...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author . Viking $39.95 (832p) ISBN 978-0-670-03392-8
In the small set of America's best contemporary novelists, Vollmann is the perpetual comet. Every two years or so he flashes across the sky with another incredibly learned, incredibly written, incredibly long novel. Two years ago, with Argall
,...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author . Ecco $29.95 (752p) ISBN 978-0-06-054818-6
This edition of Vollman's treatise on political violence, 20 or so years in the making and completed before 9/11, abridges the 3,000-plus pages of the McSweeney's edition, an NBCC Award nominee last year. As he notes in a beautifully...
READ FULL REVIEW
William T. Vollmann, Author . McSweeney's $120 (3298p) ISBN 978-1-932416-02-2
This massive, unprecedented book, begun in the early '80s and mostly completed by 1998, is nothing less than "a critique of terrorist, defensive, military and police activity," along with an attempt to construct a moral calculus for the...
READ FULL REVIEW
ARTICLES
