About The Book

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.

Praise

“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