W I L L I A M T . V O L L M A N N .
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Biography
William T. Vollmann was born in Los Angeles in 1959 and attended Deep Springs College and Cornell University. He is the author of, among others, The Atlas (winner of the 1997 PEN Center West Award), You Bright and Risen Angels, The Rainbow Stories, and a series of novels entitled Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, about the collision between the native populations of North America and their colonizers and oppressors. In addition, Vollmann's works of nonfiction include An Afghanistan Picture Show, which describes his crossing into Afghanistan with a group of Islamic commandos in 1982, and Rising Up and Rising Down, a seven-volume treatise on violence that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Spin, Gear, and Granta. In 1999, The New Yorker named Vollmann "one of the twenty best writers in America under forty." He lives in California with his wife and daughter.
In 2005, Vollmann published Europe Central, a collection of short stories about Russia and Germany during World War II.
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Books
Europe Central (Viking, 2005)
Rising Up and Rising Down (McSweeney's, 2003)
Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2003)
Argall: A Book of North Americn Landscapes (Seven Dreams, Vol. 3) (Viking Press, 2001)
The Royal Family (Viking Press, 2000)
The Students of Deep Springs College, with Michael A. Smith and L. Jackson Newell (Lodima Press, November 2000)
The Atlas (Viking Press, 1996)
Open All Night by Ken Miller (photographs), Vollmann (quotes) (Overlook Press; reprint edition, August 1996)
Grand Street 53: Fetishes (Summer 1995), editor (Grand Street, 1995)
The Rifles: A Book of North Americn Landscapes (Seven Dreams, Vol. 6) (Viking Press, 1994)
Butterfly Stories: A Novel (Grove Press, 1993)
Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs (Pantheon Books, 1993)
Fathers and Crows: A Book of North Americn Landscapes (Seven Dreams, Vol. 2) (Viking Press, 1992)
An Afghanistan Picture Show; or, How I Saved the World (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1992)
Whores for Gloria (Pantheon Books, 1992)
The Ice Shirt: A Book of North Americn Landscapes (Seven Dreams, Vol. 1) (Viking Press, 1990)
The Rainbow Stories (Atheneum, 1989)
The Tale of the Dying Lungs (Vagabond Press, 1989), out of print
The Convict Bird: A Children's Poem (CoTangent, 1987), out of print
You Bright and Risen Angels (Atheneum, 1987)
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Awards
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, 2003, Rising Up and Rising Down
Silver Medal Winner for Non-Fiction, 2001 California Book Awards, The Royal Family
PEN Center West Award, 1997, The Atlas
Whiting Writers Award, 1988
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Press and Interviews
January 2004
CNN, Associated Press
Terkel, McSweeney's on Book Critics' List
By Hillel Italie
"Competitive nominations went to two books released by McSweeney's..."
January 2004
The Boston Globe
Review: Rising Up and Rising Down: Vollmann's "Moral Calculus"
By John Freeman
"This would be a cruel, almost mean experiment were Vollmann not giving himself over so freely to what he sees as well. He has had that naked feeling of having a target painted on the back of his head by a sniper in the Balkans, but he's willing to risk it to experience what in America we only read about. His openness and curiosity inspire ours; his pain becomes ours, too."
December 2003
McSweeney's Internet Tendency
An Oral History of Rising Up and Rising Down
Compiled and Edited by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
"I didn't know that Eli was so worn out. He always seemed so chipper, and he appeared to have everything in hand. He'd grown a very long beard, I remember, and began burying his food, but otherwise there were no obvious indications of the book's effect on his life. We talked a lot about the book while editing it, and I remember that we would both periodically have moments where we'd say, 'Oh sweet Jesus, this is great, this is so fucking great!' We'd read over a particular section and feel that we were a part of something truly magnificent. That kept everyone going." —Dave Eggers
December 2003
The Denver Post
Review: Rising Up and Rising Down: History Books Calculate Infinity, Toll of Violence
By John Freeman
"Still, the greatest anguish in Rising Up and Rising Down comes not from Vollmann, but from the people he interviews. They are crushed and scoured by the weight of war. In one section, he talks to a woman whose boyfriend was cut into pieces by Croats: 'No one has a chance to open my heart again,' she says."
December 2003
Washington Post
Review: Rising Up and Rising Down: Blood Meridian
By Steven Moore
"Rising Up and Rising Down is a monumental achievement on several levels: as a hair-rising survey of mankind's propensity for violence, as a one-man attempt to construct a system of ethics, as a successful exercise in objective analysis (almost nonexistent in today's partisan, ideological, politicized, spin-doctored, theory-muddled public discourse) and as a demonstration of the importance of empathy, whether in writing a book like this or simply dealing with fellow human beings."
November 2003
Entertainment Weekly
Review: Rising Up and Rising Down: Is It a Book or a Blunt Object?
By Gregory Kirschling
"In this life we have to prostitute ourselves most of the time, and almost every prostitute I've met has one thing she won't do," says Vollmann, 44. "She won't kiss or there's one particular part of herself she saves for her boyfriend or girlfriend, or whatever—and with me, my one tiny little zone of integrity is I want my books to come out exactly the way I want them to come out."
November 2003
Los Angeles City Beat
Review: Rising Up and Rising Down
By Anthony Miller
"Vollmann has spent more time considering the issue of violence and its jusifications than any other contemporary author. Particularly at this moment in history, such a weighty inquiry demands our attention."
November 2003
San Francisco Chronicle
William T. Vollmann Is a Man of Many Words, Most of Them About His Favorite Subjects—Prostitutes, Drugs, Violence
By Jane Ganahl
"'No one is doing what Vollmann is doing these days.'
There's an understatement. Vollmann's new work, which has been 23 years in the making, aims to be nothing short of a 'critique of terrorist, defensive, military and police activity' around the world, focusing on political violence and asking the question, 'When is violence justified?'"
November 2003
San Francisco Chronicle
Review: The Varieties of Traumatic Experiences
By Andrew Ervin
"The strength of Vollmann's project lies not in its size but in his awe-inspiring ability to juggle thousands of years of historical anecdotes and events and combine them with deep personal introspection to form a wholly original insight into the history of civilization."
October 2003
Publishers Weekly
Review: Rising Up and Rising Down
Author Unknown
"In its length, this project equals Winston Churchill's somewhat similarly themed History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Conceptually, a better comparison is Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, though the present book is about three times as long, and violence has almost certainly directly killed many more people than melancholia. The photos work similarly to those in James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Proust's treatment of memory in In Search of Lost Time also makes sense as a comparison, but the people and places number far fewer there."
September 2003
Publishers Weekly
Interview: Kill 100 to Save 1000? Talks with William T. Vollmann
By Richard Albanese
"I thought it would be much shorter. It began as part political manifesto and part exploration of what proportionality and discrimination might mean in a moral calculus—in other words, if somebody decided to kill 100 people because he thought he could save 1,000 that way, is that reasonable or unreasonable?"
May 2003
The Believer
Review: "And Suppress the Unpleasant Things," On the Natural History of Destruction by W. G. Sebald
By William T. Vollmann
"In a posthumous collection of essays, entitled On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald reminds us that 'the majority of Germans today know, or so at least it is to be hoped, that we actually provoked the annihilation of the cities in which we once lived'"
2002
Hyde Park Review of Books
Interview: A Talk with William T. Vollmann: The Mad Genius of American Letters
By Kevin Canfield
"Between frequent research and reporting journeys that have taken him across the globe, William T. Vollmann has found time to write and publish more than a dozen books in the last 15 years. His last effort, the 700-plus..."
September 2001
Salon
Interview: Creating "Many, Many Osamas"
By Steve Kettmann
"Novelist William T. Vollmann, author of a dozen books including The Rainbow Stories and An Afghanistan Picture Show, has a different perspective on the Taliban than most of us."
May 2001
Free Williamsburg
(NY)
Interview
By Alexander Laurence
"Fortunately the world is so big and the technology of publication is so efficient, if it turns out, ten years from now, that there's only a handful of people who care about what I care about, maybe there will be enough to support me, and let me do what I want to do. And if there are other people who don't know what a book is, more power to them."
January 25, 2001
Bookworm, KCRW
Audio
William T. Vollman The Royal Family (Viking)
William Vollmann's growing sense of mystical Christianity is bringing him closer to Dostoevsky. This new work centers on Vollman's compassion for the downtrodden, his sympathy for prostitutes and his deep sense of himself as a born sinner.
2001
Rain Taxi Winter
Review: Argall
By Jason Picone
"Argall is Vollmann's most extreme example of English cruelty and depravity. In an era where an Englishman could be called an 'Yndian-lover' for sparing one life during a massacre of an entire Native American settlement, Argall's ruthlessness still manages to be remarkable."
2001
Turtleneck
Review: The Royal Family
By Karl Erickson
"If there is any beauty and hope in this awesome, awful novel, it is Vollman's continued treatment of this other side of life. The way he handles his characters, despite their worst flaws, is moving and his evocation to live outside of society's prescriptions, if doomed, is redeemed by the effort, the belief in a possible freedom tomorrow, whether realized by sex, drugs, nomadism, or love. Even if that freedom is always receding into the future."
2000
Beatrice Interview
Interview
By Ron Hogan
"I'm not doing it for the money, and, therefore, I can't see any reason to compromise."
1993
The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Interview
By Larry McCaffery
"My primary world is just this one basic 'dream world' that I've been in from the time I was a kid."
Commonwealthclub.com
California Book Awards
"William T. Vollmann has earned a reputation as one of the most ambitious—and prolific—writers in the U.S. today."
Alt-X Press
Interview: The Write Stuff
"With Rainbow Stories, I tried to go into all these different worlds, trying to understand what was going on. So it wasn't too much different going to different countries. Going from the Haight to the Tenderloin was like as different as going from Iceland to Greenland. It was very interesting for me, and I've never lost the desire to keep doing that."
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