The National Book Award winning author returns to his original fictional territory—the lives of the dispossessed in San Francisco—with a parable about the limitations of desire and life at the margins of societyIn such earlier works of fiction as The Rainbow Stories and The Royal Family, William T. Vollmann wrote memorably of characters living in the seamy underbelly of San Francisco's Tenderloin district. In this new novel, Vollmann returns to that gritty world with a story that centers around a woman with magical powers whom everyone loves, and who has to love them all back.Neva's world is a bar in the Tenderloin. Her worshippers include Richard, the ineffectual, alcoholic, occasionally omniscient narrator; a hardcore transgender street worker named Shantelle; the brisk but motherly barmaid Francine; and the former Frank, who has renamed herself after Judy Garland. When Judy starts to love Neva too much, Judy's retired policeman...

Includes bibliographical references

From the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central – a hugely original fictional history of Pocahontas, John Smith, and the Jamestown colony in VirginiaIn Argall, the third novel in his Seven Dreams series, William T. Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to dig beneath the legend surrounding Pocahontas, John Smith, and the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia-as well as the betrayals, disappointments, and atrocities behind it. With the same panoramic vision, mythic sensibility, and stylistic daring that he brought to the previous novels in the Seven Dreams series--hailed upon its inception as "the most important literary project of the '90s" (The Washington Post)--Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Native Americans and Europeans in the New World. In reconstructing America's past as tragedy, nightmare, and bloody spectacle, Vollmann does nothing less than reinvent the American novel.

From Publishers WeeklyThe 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 between a Baedeker and a Book of the Dead, his latest effort falls a bit flat. The "Butterfly Boy" grows up as a nerdish American kid who is routinely abused by bullies at school. His adolescent trials, configured against a backdrop of American atrocities in Vietnam, are relieved only by the affections of a particularly plucky girl who then moves away. This sets the stage for the protagonist's adult explorations of love and violence in the Far East, where, as "the journalist," he pals with "the photographer," and together they insist on developing relationships with a series of prostitutes. As always, Vollmann's style--gritty detail stirred with hallucinated fancy--perfectly serves his investigation of the profane, which in this case includes the vile horrors exacted by the Khmer Rouge. However, the heart of this darkness is not convincingly evoked, and readers may begin to wonder if the exoticism of the Orient and its women is not just a handy occasion for Vollmann to act out a forbidden fantasy. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalThis is not a collection, as the title suggests, but a novel. The main character, known as "the butterfly boy" in grade school but now simply called "the journalist," travels to Southeast Asia to investigate the prostitution problem, accompanied by a photographer. The latter proves to be an impeccable sex tourist, but the journalist is inept. He forgets to use a condom the very first night and suffers from an ever-worsening barrage of fevers and infections thereafter. Then he falls in love with one of the prostitutes and decides to marry. Typically, Vollmann is more interested in the sordid aspects of his tale than in its erotic potential. The tone is sober, almost scholarly, complete with bibliographical notes on source material ranging from Tacitus to Nazi aviator Hanna Reitsch's memoirs. Shorter and more focused than the "Seven Dreams" sequence of novels, this title presents Vollmann's trademark obsessions in a new light. For larger fiction collections.- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"The reading experience of a lifetime ..."—The Washington PostThe National Book Award winner takes readers inside the epic fighting retreat of the Nez Perce Indians In this new installment in his acclaimed series of novels examining the collisions between Native Americans and European colonizers, William T. Vollmann tells the story of the Nez Perce War, with flashbacks to the Civil War. Defrauded and intimidated at every turn, the Nez Perces finally went on the warpath in 1877, subjecting the U.S. Army to its greatest defeat since Little Big Horn as they fled from northeast Oregon across Montana to the Canadian border. Vollmann's main character is not the legendary Chief Joseph, but his pursuer, General Oliver Otis Howard, the brave, shy, tormented, devoutly Christian Civil War veteran. In this novel, we see him as commander, father, son, husband, friend, and killer.Teeming with many vivid characters on both sides of the conflict, and written in an...

From Publishers WeeklyVollmann'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. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalJimmy, a down-and-out Vietnam vet, spends his disability checks drinking in skid row bars and paying streetwalkers to tell him their life stories. Later, alone in his hotel room, he reassigns the memories he has collected to Gloria, his imaginary girlfriend. In his 1989 collection The Rainbow Stories ( LJ 6/15/89), Vollmann himself wandered the streets of San Francisco paying prostitutes for talk. Apart from the heartbreaking frame-story of Jimmy, this new book seems to consist of outtakes from the earlier book--gritty scenes of almost surreal depravity and squalor. Unfortunately, Vollmann the urban anthropologist subverts the efforts of Vollmann the novelist. In the end, one wishes he had devoted less space to the whores and more to Jimmy and his hallucinatory quest for love. A minor work by an important author.- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Amazon.com ReviewBy the standards of the street, Henry Tyler is a good man, kind to hookers and the homeless, skilled at avoiding fights. He'd be the first to admit that his job as a private investigator is unsavory, and he turns away many prospective clients by suggesting that they may not want to hate their spouses any more than they already do. The love of his life, to his regret, is his brother's sweet, conventional wife, Irene. Henry's brother John, in almost black-and-white contrast, is cold and professional, all his yearnings focused on becoming full partner in his law firm. He manages to distance himself emotionally from everything but his mother and the hand-painted Italian silk ties that signify success to him. Although not overly fond of his wife, he resents Henry's longing for her, which seems to typify everything sloppy and extravagant in his brother's nature, everything that marks him as a loser.On this classic framework William Vollmann has hung a gargantuan novel, by turns satiric, philosophical, lyrical, and baroque. It is a song of San Francisco. Rarely has a city been explored so tenderly and ruthlessly, from the mansions of Pacific Heights to the flophouses of the Tenderloin. In one of his many loving set pieces, Vollmann sends Henry Tyler through the streets surrounding Union Square, where a Peruvian quartet is playing to some weary tourist ladies. Their lives were passing, vacations trickling through the hourglass; moment by moment this warmish blue San Francisco day was being wasted. They sat beneath lush palm-trees, and distantly a trolley-car sounded its bell as he heard the ladies talking about grilled-cheese sandwiches; then he was past them and could not hear anymore. Tyler spots a gray-haired man digging in a garbage can. Near him, "reflected palm-tendrils swerved and curved in the windows of Macy's, and skyscrapers' terraces swelled and bowed there as if in the throes of an immense explosion. The Peruvians' music, gentle and strangely liquid, seemed the appropriate solvent for this image of dissolution." When Irene--pregnant and neglected--kills herself, John disappears into his work while Henry, in a quest that parallels the course of his grief, devotes himself to the Queen of the Whores, a dark saint who protects the lowest of the low. It makes all the difference that our Virgil for this journey to the underworld is this good-natured and observant man, whose physical appetites never overwhelm his sympathy for the addicted and exploited. Henry remains firmly on the side of good, even when the boundaries blur before his eyes. At times, the author invites identification with his big-hearted hero, as when he veers into an agitated, first-person essay on the judicial evil of bail. Beat-flavored, with touches of Rabelais, Céline, and, oddly, T.S. Eliot, The Royal Family is Vollmann's most ambitious work to date, and a noisy, compelling world in itself. --Regina MarlerFrom Publishers WeeklyAmbitious 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-light district and of the people who try to live there. John Tyler is a successful San Francisco lawyer; his brother, Henry, is a dodgy private eye in love with John's Korean wife, Irene. When Irene commits suicide, the siblings' bitterness becomes apparent. A grieving Henry frequents the prostitutes of SF's notorious Tenderloin district; John edges towards marrying his mistress, Celia. A brutal businessman named Brady has hired Henry to track down the "Queen of Whores." Pedophile and police informant Dan Smooth finally leads Henry to the Queen, an African-American woman of indeterminate age and immense psychological insight. Rather than turn her over to Brady, Henry warns her about him. Gradually the Queen helps Henry shed his grief for Irene by leading him down the dark, dank staircase of sexual and social degradation. He learns about masochism, golden showers and other unusual practicesDand about love. But the Queen's command of her realm is imperiled: Brady wants to import her Tenderloin prostitutes for his Las Vegas sex emporium. Vollmann is after large-scale social chronicle; he includes characters from nearly every walk of life, and trains his attentions on processes not often seen by the faint of heart: cash flow, blood flow, phone sex, Biblical apocrypha (the Book of Nirgal) and the body odor of crackheads. But this hypperrealistic novelist also aims to present a metaphysics: the two brothers stand for two kinds of human being, the chosen and the outcast. As in all Vollmann's novels, the author's encylopedic ambition sometimes overwhelms the human scale; some supporting characters, though, do stay vivid. Vollmann avoids simply glamorizing the outcasts but remains, deep down, a Blakean romantic: prostitution is for him not only the universal indictment of the human race but also, paradoxically, the only paradise we can actually visit. 5-city author tour. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers WeeklyLast 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 five years into something resembling "The World According to Me." Although Vollmann's style is to play it coy with respect to what is fact and what is fiction, there is no mystery as to who is doing the talking here: it is the same persona we've seen in all his books (The Rifles; Whores for Gloria; etc.), a kind of rogue innocent, a Candide with a supply of condoms and a girl in every port. And indeed, Atlas sports quite an itinerary: from Mt. Etna to Zagreb, with stops in dozens of places, none of which will surprise readers of Vollmann's previous travelogues. Unfortunately, for all the traveling, Vollmann never manages to escape his own obsessions. Whether he is discoursing on drinking beer or shooting heroin or smoking crack or chewing khat in San Francisco, Bangkok or Kenya, the reader is treated to the same lovelorn teddy-bear pining after a devastated whoredom, as if the world can be reduced to a rainy afternoon in a bug-infested hotel room. The Vollmann character throws money around (within limits), makes halting efforts at moral education, professes his love and then starts another chapter. Is this the noblesse oblige of the post-partisan American? Despite a structure that Vollmann says, in his preface, is a thematic palindrome, intrepid readers may find it a thematic monotone. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. FromVollmann has gained cult status in the writing world, which, by definition, means his work is not for tradition-bound, and certainly not timid, readers. His novels and stories--and differentiating between a Vollmann novel and a collection of his stories is often difficult, because, in his hands, the two forms share a similar structure--are surrealistic, sordid, sensational, and terrific. His latest book is ostensibly a 53-piece collection of travel writing, "a piecemeal atlas of the world I think in," as he words it. What it is, in effect, is a kaleidoscope of verbal pictures, rendered with the incredible vividness of his gritty but beautiful style. Whether he's writing about the crowds in New York's Grand Central Station ("the people who rushed through this concourse came from the rim of everywhere to be ejaculated everywhere, redistributing themselves without reference to each other" ) or witnessing mosquitoes driving human and beast to madness in the Yukon ("the most horrible thing that I have ever seen" ), Vollmann expresses himself with a clarity and a visualization all his own. His readership is growing; no fan will be disappointed here. Brad Hooper