Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs - Softcover

Vollmann, William T.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802133959 ISBN 13: 9780802133953

Publisher: Grove Press, 1994

Synopsis

The invisible lives of prostitutes, pimps, pornographers, skinheads, and crack addicts are revealed in stories from the dark edge of contemporary life, combining elements of travel writing and reportage, autobiography and anecdotes, and told in a unique, searing voice. Original.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

The settings for the stories in Vollmann's collection range from Las Vegas to Bangkok, but his protagonists share traits in common. They are the desperate, the haunted, those who have reached the end of their ropes and are trying to make sense of a world that has failed them. The prostitutes and pimps, the addicts and the skinheads, who are the subjects of Vollmann's stories are all engaged in larger journeys of self-discovery. The hope that the next fix, the next night of sex, the next trip abroad will finally lead them to an always allusive internal peace.

"As diverse and exciting a group of stories as anyone has had to show for the last few years"--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"And certainly no one writing today of any generation has more news to relate than Vollmann, a rough-edged beast who has been slouching toward some millennial Bethlehem with a monstrous elegance, utter fearlessness, and voracious appetite that one associates with Melville, Whitman and Pynchon."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"William T. Vollmann has become the reigning kid genius of American fiction."--USA Today

"William T. Vollmann looks to be the most prodigiously talented and historically important novelist under 35.... Since 1987 he has published books which tower over the work of his contemporaries by virtue of their enormous range, huge ambition, stylistic daring, wide learning, audacious innovation, and sardonic wit."--The Washington Post Book World

"William Vollmann is certainly the most unconventional--and possibly also the most exciting and imaginative--novelist at work today."--New York Newsday

William T. Vollmann is the author of Whores for Gloria, You Bright and Risen Angels, The Rainbow Stories, The Ice-Shirt, An Afghanistan Picture Show, Fathers and Crows, Butterfly Stories, The Rifles, and Open All Night (with photographs by Ken Miller). His collection of essays, The Atlas, was awarded the Pen Center West Award. He has also received the Whiting Foundation Award and the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Award for his fiction, and in June 1999 The New Yorker named him one of the twenty best American writers under the age of forty. His most recently published work is the novel The Royal Family.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Boisterous as ever, Vollmann continues to revel in quixotic moments of human experience similar to those in his other tales (Fathers and Crows, etc.), yet this collection is far less successful in providing a solid basis from which his anarchic vision can flourish. With San Francisco as a point of departure and the crisis of parting from it as a catalyst for reflection, Vollmann's narrator ponders a m‚lange of colorful but troubled acquaintances, tracing their individual journeys to dissolution and despair, as well as his own tortured experience. Tragic figures all, some of them manage at least to eke out a marginal existence, while others, like Elaine Suicide, are dead from the outset; the somber saga of her affair with handcuff-haunted Abraham in all its sadomasochistic splendor is the centerpiece here. From a father obsessed with dogtags stripped from a German soldier he'd killed in the closing moments of WW II, Abraham inherits a fetishism that becomes fully formed in his relationship with Elaine, as the two feed each other's fantasies in Gun City, U.S.A. Voyeurs and sorry dreamers of all kinds occupy other pieces--from hapless Ken, whose passion for Asian women prompts a string of disappointing liaisons, to failed operative Nicholas, whose enthusiasm for covert life in Latin America makes him unable to abandon it after his removal from US government service. Stitched between these tales are short, savage epitaphs for a range of dead heroes and objects, including a fierce jaguar hunted down in the jungle of Belize and, finally, the book itself. Energetic and witty if unfocused--but, still, this shows the prodigious talent that has been better realized in earlier work. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0802133959
• ISBN 13: 9780802133953
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256