New Releases by William T Vollmann

"Dans la boîte de nuit, on n''y voyait rien. L''air était brunnoir comme l''arbre qu''on lui avait montré à Choeung Ek, l''arbre dont l''écorce était imprégnée de sang séché à l''endroit où les Khmers rouges fracassaient les crânes de bébés. A tâtons, il trouva une table poisseuse de bière renversée. - Vanna est là ? - Vous voulez bière Tiger ? - Non. Vanna. Fille Je veux Vanna. - Non. Non. Non. Vous trop trompez, mon ami. - Je veux me marier avec Vanna. J''ai acheté anneau d''or pour elle. Empoignant le journaliste par le bras, le mac, serveur ou videur ou quoi qu''il fût, le flanqua à la porte. Il eut le temps de se retourner vers les visages qui l''observaient dans l''ombre, faces de chats jaunes et grasses. " Un journaliste américain en quête d''amour s''éprend d''une prostituée cambodgienne. Dans une région du monde ravagée par la pauvreté, la maladie et les luttes sanguinaires, il se laisse progressivement glisser vers la mort. Un conte exotique, érotique et provocateur qui illustre le singulier talent d''écriture d''un auteur considéré comme l''un des représentants les plus significatifs d''une nouvelle génération de romanciers américains.

In The Atlas, William T. Vollmann presents his vision of our planet at the cusp, with old conflicts smoldering on and new miseries and estrangements multiplying. Bosnia, Phnom Penh, Jerusalem, New York, Mogadishu, the Arctic, a bazaar of fortune-tellers in Burma, a robber-infested disco in Madagascar - against these backdrops, Vollmann''s tales live their own various and wildly different lives, from fable to surrealistic portrait to reportage. Above all, it is the human beings in this book who engage us: the old walrus hunter, the crack-addicted prostitute whose children have been taken away from her, the boxer brought in to lose, the drunken gypsy, and from time to time, of course, the author himself. Through their eyes, Vollmann writes of memory, oppression, loneliness, war, the thrill of the alien, and the infinitely precious pain of love. Arranged as a huge thematic palindrome, The Atlas showcases Vollmann''s ability to build strange structures, sonnets composed of stories instead of words.

The story of John Franklin’s doomed 1845 attempt to discover a Northwest Passage, from the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central Vaulting through time to another flashpoint in the long struggle between Indians and Europeans, William T. Vollmann''s visionary fictional history now focuses on the white explorers of the mid-1800s, desperately dreaming of forging a Northwest Passage. As Sir John Franklin embarks on his fourth Arctic voyage, he defies the warnings of the native people, and his journey ends in ice and death. But his spirit lingers in the Canadian north, where 150 years later, in 1990, Inuit elders dream of long-gone seal-hunting days and teenagers sniff gasoline. And when a white man seduces and leaves pregnant a young Indian woman, he becomes Franklin reincarnated, bound for the same fate. Vollmann''s vivid characters and landscapes weave together the stories of the past and present to live out America''s ongoing tragedy of greed, ignorance, and violence.

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.

The second volume of a saga that chronicles the relations between native Americans and their colonizers begins four hundred years ago in the Great Lakes region, where Jesuit priests martyr themselves to save the disease-ridden villages of the Huron.--Amazon.com.

A majestic fictional evocation of the Norse arrival in the New World, from the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central 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.

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.

From a writer who has won comparison with Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs comes thirteen unnerving and often breathtaking stories populated by punks and angels, skinheads and religious assassins, streetwalkers and fetishists--people who live outside the law and and the clear light of the every day. Set in landscapes as diverse as ancient Babylon, India, and the seamy underbelly of San Francisco, these daring and innovative tales are laced with Vollman''s fertile imagination. The Rainbow Stories ushers us into a world that bears an awful yet hypnotic resemblance to that of our deepest nightmares, confirming Vollman''s reputation as a dark visionary of contemporary fiction.

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.