Jordan and Ryan are back to celebrate the release of A TABLE FOR FORTUNE - coming 3/3/26 from Arcade Publishing - and discuss their thoughts on the first few hundred pages of WTV's long awaited God's Lonely Men-Cold War-War on Terror epic.

Preorder today via Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop.org.

In A Table for Fortune, National Book Award-winner William T. Vollmann depicts from the balcony-level of history the last half-century of American politics, war, and life. At once a family drama, bildungsroman, and national epic, this 3,000+ page, four-part novel may be our most ambitious writer's most ambitious work.

Parts 1 and 2 gather from the half-forgotten annals of the near-past - Stasi documents, Iraqi newspaper articles, presidential radio addresses - to form a vivid and mesmeric epic centered on Elliott Stevens, or DAVE, a CIA analyst whose glee at winning the Cold War is matched only by the dread that culminates in the nightmares of September eleventh and the resulting War on Terror. The hero of Parts 3 and 4 is Matthew Stevens, Elliott's son, whose efforts to divine the fate of his life and escape his parents result in homelessness, addiction, and perhaps even happiness.

Spanning from 1968 to 2019, these volumes comb together - with Vollmann's trademark generous wit and Olympian prose - a staggeringly well-researched, definitive history of American post-war foreign policy with a deft, moving chronicle of a family's descent into resentment and gloom. Not since War and Peace have the internal lives of characters and the history of a nation been forged together in so forceful a study of causes, fate, and nationhood.

Elliott and Matthew Stevens are “passengers within a divine bullet,” which, like Gogol's troika before it, overtakes all flying to its nation's end. This boxed set, with all four volumes in hardcover, allows the book to be read as intended: as one towering novel, the magnum opus of one of the giants of literature.

Show Notes:

A Reflection of the Public: A Short Story

Heading Toward Nowhere

Drones and Decolonization

Four Men: Keeping Company with Outdoor People

American Writing Today: A Diagnosis of the Disease

Credits:

Show logo (“An Incomplete Map of Vollmannia”) courtesy of Anna Roth.

Music: Jeannette Fang, Preludes, Op. 28 - No. 2 'Presentiment of Death' by Frédéric Chopin. Public Domain Mark 1.0 – No Copyright from https://musopen.org.

Contact:

Email: vollmannia@gmail.com

Twitter: @vollmannia

Instagram: @vollmannia

http://vollmannia.buzzsprout.com/

William T. Vollmann has partnered with us to sell 10 prints of his painting "Dolores as a Golden Monkey"! Each print will cost $2,500. Bill has provided a full description below. Order yours today (https://square.link/u/IfOW4bYw)!


“Dolores as a Golden Monkey” is one of my transgender self-portraits. The old-timey lumber shop some two blocks from my studio made me ten 16 x 20” cherrywood panels, with frames to fit, each frame consisting of two L-shaped pieces which I could engrave and paint either before or after seating the painting inside. In this case the masklike figures on the frame were obviously done first, thereby isolating and commenting on instead of extending the acrylic-painted image, and incidentally almost occluding Dolores’s female parts in proof that I, too, can abase myself to honor “family values.” The framed size of this painting is 18 x 22”.

My longterm model Lindsay R. considers this one of her favorites among my paintings. I like it for its bittersweet whimsicality. Dolores would like to be “real,” and here she hopefully pretends to be, but at any moment she will be disassembled and returned to my meat locker. (At age 64, I anticipate a similar fate.) Hence, perhaps, her look of wide-eyed, slightly anxious bewilderment. Like me, Dolores tries and tries to please, but can never be good enough.

I prepared this panel with three layers of gold gesso over two layers of white. Gold-colored acrylic was added to the earrings, etc., to sparkle up the old girl. I am surprised to see how well it shines in this reproduction, which was painstakingly prepared for me by dear friends Jeff and Katherine Cox. (It speaks especially well of Katherine’s tolerance that she worked so patiently on an image not to her liking. On her computer screen she made D. less disgusting by superimposing one of those fig leaves called sticky notes. Thank you for keeping on, Pixel Princess!)

Thanks to Jeff’s high-resolution image capture, I knew that the picture would hold up at larger than life size. This archival inkjet print (on Canson Arches Aquarelle rag paper, in the heavier weight of 310 gsm) reveals brush strokes and suchlike details. The painting and its frame are reproduced at a 20 x 24” — in area about 121% of the framed original. The total print dimensions are 24 x 30”.

This edition is limited to 1 trial proof, 2 artist’s proofs and 10 signed, numbered copies.

As I always remind myself, the world does not owe me a living, and if nobody considers this reproduction worth the price, then I will get another of the come-uppances that keep me in trim. But if the edition sells out, I would like to see what one of my gum bichromate photographs looks like when much enlarged. Will all the little dots of mineral pigment reveal themselves?

Please write to Jordan if you would like me to reproduce anything else. (I would need to commission several copies of a given print to justify Jeff and Katherine’s painstaking labor.)

Thank you to everyone who has supported me over the decades.

William T. Vollmann
December 2023


Credits:
Show logo (“An Incomplete Map of Vollmannia”) courtesy of Anna Roth.
Music: Jeannette Fang, Preludes, Op. 28 - No. 2 'Presentiment of Death' by Frédéric Chopin. Public Domain Mark 1.0 – No Copyright from https://musopen.org.

Contact:
Email: vollmannia@gmail.com
Twitter: @vollmannia
Instagram: @vollmannia
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In Part I of this special episode, we’re joined by William T. Vollmann to discuss SHADOWS OF LOVE, SHADOWS OF LONELINESS, a two-volume retrospective covering his forty years of photography, painting, illustration, and literary enterprise across the globe. These beautiful editions are available 10/24/23 from Unnamed Press and Rare Bird. Order your set today!

William T. Vollmann is the author of ten novels, including Whores for Gloria, The Royal Family, and Europe Central, which won the National Book Award. He has also written four collections of stories (including The Rainbow Stories and The Atlas, which won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction), a memoir, and eight works of nonfiction, including Rising Up and Rising Down and Imperial, both of which were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in California.

Stay tuned for Part II, where we’ll be joined by some special guests to continue the conversation in a more traditionally-formatted episode.

Show Notes:

Be sure to read Vollmann’s new essay, “Four Men”, in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Credits:

Show logo (“An Incomplete Map of Vollmannia”) courtesy of Anna Roth. You can buy official merch with all profits going to her studio, Strollology!

Music: Jeannette Fang, Preludes, Op. 28 - No. 2 'Presentiment of Death' by Frédéric Chopin. Public Domain Mark 1.0 – No Copyright from https://musopen.org.

Contact:

Email: vollmannia@gmail.com

Twitter: @vollmannia

Instagram: @vollmannia

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