William Vollmann

Rainbow Stories has some GREAT pieces and a few duds. Same with Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaths, both of which books contain some of his earliest writing. Avoid his first novel (Oh You Bright and Risen Angels). Butterfly Stories and The Rifles best capture what I consider his "mid period" apex where he's not just a big sprawl, but he's still got ambitious scope.

The Atlas has some incredible stories mixed with some okay ones, but is much better as a whole than his other two collections.

Finally, Argall is his most rigorous historic novel and v. absorbing, while The Royal Family seems to be his definitive statement on SF whores which I found quite good though rilly getting a bit unwieldy by the last third.

rising up really blew me away by how absorbing it became -- like i feel i need to get into a vollmann "groove" and forget that i'm in the middle of this big weird project, and his prose is better at that than lotsa other writers who either consciously or not call attention to their own shtick.

i mean for a guy with this much shtick he manages to not call attention to it pretty well.

dave- what did you think of 'royal family' (if you found it, that is)?

Fathers and Crows is sorta between his more compact but structurally weirder stuff and his more straightforward stuff, but if you're interested in Catholocism its the one to get.

Argall is the most straightforward but longest of the bunch. I think its his tightest prose, and feels the most *in* the period.

depends what yr. looking for, i guess.

(have you read any vollmann or are you just asking me to expand for the sake of it?)

but vollman just sometimes gets *stuck* there and can't leave.

i don't know who else even has the ambition to really try a thing like that though? cormac mccarthy, at times? which i also find miserable.

but vollmann can strike the *right* balance with it too, like the bits on The Recording Angel in The Atlas, or the opening part of Rainbow Stories.

Lovecraft!

Also, I'm sort of surprised (and not) by the hatred for You Bright and Risen Angels, as that's his only book that is stylistically dissimilar from any of his others. I know some people who claim that it's his only good book, for that reason (though I heartily disagree).

Anyway, if asking a question deserves such a beatdown/derision, why should I bother? I was pretty clearly not making fun or trolling, so why get bent out of shape?

(stencil the problem just is that it would be really interesting to read why you like that end of the ice-shirt, for example, or why you like Bright And Risen -- which by the way isn't stylistically dissimilar from parts of some of the stuff i mentioned and is also real close thematically to Afghan Picture Show)

I'd have to re-read The Ice Shirt because I'm blanking on the ending right now, but I don't remember having major problems with it at the time I read it (about 2 years ago, maybe).

http://www.hplovecraft.com/popcult/moviestv/based.htm

poor people

No one ever talks about Whores For Gloria.

My god, he has published about ten books I hadn't heard about*, since the last time I looked.

*Alas, since reading book reviews is no longer part of my job, I am fairly unaware of what's being published in general.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8sMpXDyWvRA/Tbn7AhYvCXI/AAAAAAAAAHg/2V2VZkJd7kU/s1600/william_vollmann2.jpg

briefly, writing this on my phone without benefit of zing app.

sterlclove got me into vollmann a long time ago. i bought a paperback of rainbow stories and flipped randomly to "yellow rose." i read it and loved it and slowly worked through the rest of it. my love for vollmann is embarrassing (i think i still hate most of his fiction though).

recently. i liked the sad conventional riding toward everywhere. kissing the mask was unexpected and i like to read vollmann writing about femininity, where he has viewpoints i can sympathize with or understand, and writing about other things he doesn't understand at all. imperial was great... mixture of everything vollmann does, amateur ethnography & social history, perfect lyrical writing (the pages on his camping trip are the best writing he's ever done), stunt writing adventures in whorehouses, sympathetic portraits, investigative reporting. it's long and it's not even long enough. i love the repetition (of phrases themes words), the dullness (rainfall charts erosion chemistry inventories of investigative reporting and canal voyage preparations financial info) + the way those repetitive slow passages or chapters emerge suddenly onto lyrical descriptions of the breasts of a taco stand girl or the desert or build up slowly walking down the streets of calexico.

http://www.amazon.ca/The-Book-Dolores-William-Vollmann/dp/1576876578

wow

So, apparently he has an article in September's Harper's about all the goodies he found in his FBI file. Life as a Terrorist -- Uncovering my FBI file (harper's.org)

It's the first time in a while that I've regretted letting my subscription lapse. There's some information to be gleaned here: FBI suspected William Vollmann was the Unabomber (washingtonpost.com)

http://harpers.org/blog/2013/08/pages-from-william-t-vollmanns-fbi-file/

The Most Honest Book About Climate Change Yet: William T. Vollmann’s latest opus is brilliant, but it offers no comfort to its readers, review Nathaniel Rich.

In Carbon Ideologies, William T. Vollmann imagines for himself the opposite: a murderously hostile reader who sneers at his arguments, ridicules his feeblemindedness, scorns his pathetic attempts at ingratiation. Vollmann can’t blame this reader, whom he addresses regularly throughout Carbon Ideologies, because she lives in the future, under radically different circumstances—inhabiting a “hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet.” He envisions her turning the pages of his climate-change opus within the darkened recesses of an underground cave in which she has sought shelter from the unendurable heat; the plagues, droughts, and floods; the methane fireballs racing across boiling oceans. Because the soil is radioactive, she subsists on insects and recycled urine, and regards with implacable contempt her ancestors, who, as Vollmann tells her, “enjoyed the world we possessed, and deserved the world we left you.”

A few years ago, the novelist William T. Vollmann was diagnosed with colon cancer. The prognosis wasn’t great but he went ahead with the treatment. A length of intestine drawn out and snipped. It was awful but it worked. The cancer went into remission.

Then his daughter died.

Then he got dropped by his publisher.

Then he got hit by a car.

Then he got a pulmonary embolism.

But things are looking up.

William T. Vollmann spent “twelve or fifteen years” researching and writing a novel about the CIA called A Table for Fortune; as of this writing it has a few back-channel blurbs from editors and assistants who’ve caught glimpses and say it might be his masterpiece, or at the very least a new sort of achievement for him. But when he finished it, in 2022, he turned it over to his publisher, the final installment of a multi-book contract (although even that part gets complicated), and that’s when, to use Vollmann’s words, “Viking fired me."

https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/the-last-contract

that article is as long as a vollmann book

Thanks for sharing that, ET. Enjoyed it all the way through, especially as a chronicle of that early-90s generation of writers and their editors and agents.