William T Vollmann Books In Order

Seven Dreams Books In Order

The Ice-Shirt (1990)
Fathers and Crows (1992)
Argall (2001)
The Dying Grass (2015)
The Rifles (1994)

Novels

You Bright and Risen Angels (1987)
Who*res for Gloria (1991)
Open All Night (1995)
The Atlas (1996)
The Royal Family (2000)
The Lucky Star (2020)

Collections

The Rainbow Stories (1989)
Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs (1991)
Butterfly Stories (1993)
Expelled from Eden (2004)
Europe Central (2005)
Last Stories and Other Stories (2014)

Non fiction

Seven Dreams Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

William T Vollmann Books Overview

The Ice-Shirt

The time is the tenth century A.D. The newcomers are a proud and bloody minded people whose kings once changed themselves into wolves. The Norse have advanced as implacably as a glacier from Iceland to the wastes of Greenland ?and from there to the place they call ?Vinland the Good.? The natives are a bronze skinned race who have not yet discovered iron and still see themselves as part of nature. As William T. Vollmann tells the converging stories of these two peoples?and of the Norsewomen Freydis and Gudrid, whose venomous rivalry brings frost into paradise?he creates a tour de force of ?speculative history,? a vivid amalgam of Icelandic saga, Inuit creation myth, and contemporary travel writing that yields a new an utterly original vision of our continent and its past.

Fathers and Crows

With the same panoramic vision and mythic sensibility he brought to The Ice Shirt, Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Indians and Europeans in the New World. Through the eyes of vastly different peoples, Vollmann reconstructs America’s tragic past.

Argall

Praise for the Seven Dreams series: ‘There is every indication that the Seven Dreams septology will be the most important literary project of the ’90s.’ The Washington Post ‘The Seven Dreams sequence promises to return us to the history of the North American continent in a form we’ve never seen before…
it is likely to become one of the masterpieces of the century.’ The Chicago Tribune For the past ten years William T. Vollmann has been working on one of the most ambitious novelistic projects of his generation: a seven volume series of novels Seven Dreams that examines the repeated collisions between Native Americans and European colonizers and oppressors. Thus far, three novels have been published: The Ice Shirt, Fathers and Crows, and The Rifles. In Argall, the third book in the series and the fourth to be published, Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to imagine what the lives of John Smith, Pocahontas, and their contemporaries might really have been like. Behind all of these characters stands the terrifying figure of Captain Samuel Argall, who will abduct Pocahontas, burn Indian towns, and bring black slavery to North America. This magnificent novel digs beneath the romantic legend of Pocahontas and the betrayals, disappointments, and atrocities behind it, offering a moving tale of dispossession that will appeal to fans of history and contemporary fiction alike.

The Rifles

The latest installment of Vollmann’s seven part epic chronicling the clash of Europeans and Native Americans in the New World. Volume six focuses on the white explorers of the mid 1800s, desperately dreaming of forging a Northwest passage.

You Bright and Risen Angels

A bold allegorical epic that hovers somewhere between the surreal and the incredible. Vollmann tells of the battle for power between the inventors and developers of electricity and the insect world.

Who*res for Gloria

From the acclaimed author of The Rainbow Stories, The Ice Shirt, and Fathers and Crows comes this fever dream of a novel about an alcoholic Vietnam veteran, Jimmy, who devotes his government check and his waking hours to the search for a beautiful and majestic street who*re, a woman who may or may not exist save in Jimmy’s rambling dreams. Gloria’s image seems distilled from memory and fantasy and the fragments of whatever Jimmy can buy from the other who*res: their sex, their stories all the unavailing dreams of love and salvation among the drinkers and addicts who haunt San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.

The Atlas

Set in locales from Phnom Penh to Sarajevo, from Jerusalem to New York, and provocatively combining autobiography with invention, these 53 interconnected tales examine poverty, violence, and loss, even as they celebrate the beauty of landscape, the thrill of the alien, and the infinitely precious pain of love.

The Royal Family

A magnificent new novel from a writer whose books, ‘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 PostIn The Royal Family, William T. Vollmann uses the story of two brothers to construct a haunting series of parallels between the lives of the dispossessed and the anxious middle class. Henry Tyler is a failing private detective in San Francisco. When the love of his life, Irene who happens to be married to his brother John, an ambitious contract lawyer commits suicide, he clings despairingly to her ghost. Struggling to turn his grief into something precious, Henry enters into a new life of nightmare beauty and degradation as he attempts to track down the legendary Queen of the Prostitutes. Crafted out of language by turns eloquent, humorous, sensual, and obscene, and full of vividly rendered depictions of low life bars, office politics, and hobo camps, here are Vollmann’s familiar but ever surprising characters the seekers, the vigilantes, the hypocrites, the street prostitutes. He has woven their stories into a vivid and unforgettable novel about the eerie paradoxes of possession and loss.

The Rainbow Stories

Here are 13 daring and innovative tales dealing with ‘skinheads, x ray patients, who*res, lovers, fetishists, and other lost souls’ who populate landscapes as diverse as ancient Babylon, India, and contemporary San Francisco. Part fiction, part reportage, these narratives are laced with a bleak and bitter humor, and portray a dazzling array of characters.

Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs

The invisible lives of prostitutes, pimps, po*rnographers, 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.

Butterfly Stories

Butterfly Stories follows a dizzying cradle to grave hunt for love that takes the narrator from the comfortable confines of suburban America to the killing fields of Cambodia, where he falls in love with Vanna, a prostitute from Phnom Penh. Here, Vollmann’s gritty style perfectly serves his examination of sex, violence, and corruption.

Expelled from Eden

‘William T. Vollmann can be ranked among the eight or ten greatest novelists America has produced.’ The Washington Post Book World William T. Vollmann is one of our greatest living writers. Masterworks such as ‘You Bright and Risen Angels,’ ‘The Royal Family,’ and ‘Rising Up and Rising Down’ his latest work, a stunning 3,300 page tour de force have launched him into the literary stratosphere. He stands today as one of America’s leading contenders for a future Nobel Prize in literature. Here is his long awaited ‘best of’ collection, intended both as an introduction for the curious reader, and as a necessary addition to the existing fan’s collection. With excerpts from all of Vollmann’s novels including several not yet published, journalistic pieces, essays, correspondence, and poetry, ‘Expelled from Eden‘ creates a unique, kaleidoscopic portrait of one of America’s most notorious, protean, devastating, and necessary writers.

Europe Central

Audacious. Wildly ambitious. Prolific. All describe William T. Vollmann, author of the seven volume nonfiction work Rising Up and Rising Down and the Seven Dreams sequence of novels, which the Chicago Tribune hailed as likely to become one of the masterpieces of the century. In Europe Central, Vollmann presents a mesmerizing series of intertwined paired stories that compare and contrast the moral decisions made by various figures some famous, some infamous, some unknown associated with the warring authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century. He conjures up two generals, one Russian and one German, who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons and with different results. Another pairing tells of two heroes a female Russian partisan martyred at the beginning of World War II and a young German man who joins the SS in order to reveal its secrets and halt its crimes. Several stories concern the complex and elusive Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the Stalinist assaults against his work and life; also explored are the fates of artists and poets such as K the Kollwitz, Anna Akhmatova, and the documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen. Europe Central is another high wire act of fiction by a writer of prodigious talent.