>>25627653>Is he goodYes>Is he as good as his fans sayNo>Is he essentialProbably not>Is he better than most living writersYes>Is he worth readingYes>What's his best bookEither Europe Central, Fathers and Crows, or The Dying Grass>What's his worst bookProbably The Royal Family>Where do I startThe Atlas, loosely linked short stories about war, cruelty, and poverty. People will tell you Whores for Gloria, but his prostitution shit is consistently his weakest work. If you want an easier inroad to his style, then Riding Toward Everywhere, which is basically a very long and entertaining magazine article about hopping freight trains>Is he libtardedYes, but not in the sense that you mean (ie, not anxious handwringing about being a heckin good person, more thoroughgoing contempt for being told what to do) and no, but not in the sense that you mean (ie, he doesn't think that [insert right-wing buzzword] is heckin based, but he has little use or patience for more suffering = more holy and better)>He's a TRANNY!!!!He's not, but he did dress up as a woman to see what it'd be like to be a woman. It's one of his stranger and better books>Most overrated and most underrated book by himMost overrated's probably Whores for Gloria. Most underrated's probably Imperial, think Moby-Dick but nonfiction and about one California county's water usage problem. Overlong but fascinating>Best quality as a writerFearlessness>Worst quality as a writerLoquaciousness>Anything else I should know?An interviewer once asked him what his favorite contemporary books were and he answered "Contemporary? Oh, so anything in the past 500 years." which is a very /lit/ answer to my mind
>>25627685faggy tryhard pic makes me not want to read him
>>25627692You don't have to if you don't want to
>>25627685I agree with this post almost completely. Odd to see that here.
>>25627695his books seem cool, i just dont want to encounter any attention-whoring or safe-edginess and i dont want his stories to give off the same energy as that corny pic
>>25627685This undersells Imperial and leaves out Rising Up And Rising Down and the Carbon Ideologies books, but otherwise good post. I don't know why people praise the "prostitution trilogy" either.
>>25627692Dude was probably in his early 20s at the latest. Shit happens in those ages.
>>25627708He's neither an attention whore nor safe edgy. The pic is corny but he earns it. Guy got blown up by a land mine in Bosnia, tortured by a New York street gang, spent a year smoking crack with hookers in San Francisco, almost died doing research for a book about Arctic explorers (hypothermia, burned his sleeping bag while hallucinating from sleep deprivation, burned himself really badly), tried to fight with the mujahideen (and failed completely, it's the subject of An Afghanistan Picture Show), even bought a child prostitute to rescue her from sex trafficking. Basically the only writer left who's willing to do that kind of shit for his work. He's got a lot of flaws as a writer and I wouldn't say you have to read him, but he's never faking it
>>25627708He is not an attention whore or edgy at all. He has almost no instincts for self preservation or for avoiding contamination. Probably that picture was taken by some whole whore while he was having fun pointing the gun at his own head and she had to tell him to look at the camera for the picture.
>>25627728>>25627753okay my anxieties are remedied, thank you anons
>>25627728Interesting life for sure, but dare I ask was he trying to avoid facing some deep-running emotional issues?
>>25627785Most certainly
>>25627785You guessed it. When he was a kid his parents went out of the house and told him to keep an eye on his little sister. While he was reading and supposed to be watching her, she fell into a pond by their house and drowned. Guy had nightmares about her corpse chasing him and punishing him for decades afterward
>>25627824It seems he lost his daughter too, relatively recently. Fucking hell
I like that he got carpal tunnel from writing too much, but I heard he's a tranny and can't be bothered.
>>25627846>Vollmann, whose most recent books are ‘Fathers and Crows’ and ‘An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World,’ has gotten a lot of mainstream praise in the publishing world, and has been compared to Pynchon and Burroughs. He looks, however, like someone who just walked off the pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine. It wasn’t the plaid shirt or the farmer’s hat that said ‘butterfly.’ It was the metal case that looked as though it once held a high-school clarinet. From it, Vollmann unpacked a small revolver, scanning the audience with his computer-programmer eyes. To punctuate the reading, Vollmann would point the gun at the ceiling and fire. Blanks, but in a black room rapidly filling with smoke and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, who can be sure? By the third shot, anxiety made it impossible to concentrate on the story Vollmann was reading. (For the record, it was about the Iroquois, and it contained several graphic descriptions of torture.)How about now you pea brained weirdo? To still no?
>>25627653He's one of the premiere authors for young progressives to read to feel smart.
>>25627928I trust any writer who's this goddamn ugly
>>25628177Absolutely
>>25627837Yeah, poor woman drank herself to death. Wasn't even 25. If that wasn't enough the man's got terminal colon cancer.
>>25628526Why not try for a cure with ai? There's been so many cancer cure approaches tried in the last year alone.
>>25627685>ie, not anxious handwringing about being a heckin good personHe's written like three books on the subject of sheltering the unhoused
I respect vollmann a lot for how deep he goes with his research and the lengths he goes through to write his books, but the writing itself I just find awful most of the time. I think it goes to show you that life experience isn't everything when it comes to writing.
>>25628177when u right, u right
>>25627941So you feel smarter reading him, yeah. The trick part is that reading him does actually make you smarter, the sneaky guy.
>>25627653I refuse to believe anyone's actually read Rising Up And Rising Down.
>>25630252What's the filter in this case, its size?
>>25630258Partly it's the size. The complete unabridged edition is the length of Proust. It might be slightly longer. Partly it's the writing itself. Lots of war reportage, lots of Vollmann trying to do layman metaethics, lots of tables and charts.
Is the anon who had a dedicated bookshelf for Vollmann among us
>>25627685no one’s as good as their fans say they are… yet Vollmann remains essential if only for being a tireless font of words for 40 some-odd years. the breadth. the scope. the scale. he’s a hilarious and thoroughly delusional last of a dying breed of stubborn iconoclast, and one of the 90s best journalists, if nothing else… you’ve gotta respect it.
>>25627685fpbp
I just finished An Afghanistan Picture Show. I haven't warmed up to his style.
>>25627728All this sounds good. Until you do any of it. It's shit. It sounds romantic and worldly to smoke crack in San francisco but it's actually just you being a homeless retard. It sounds romantic to be in a shitty bar larping as bukowski but it really just in a shitty bar with shitty people. It sounds romantic to fight with the mujahideen but I bet it was a lot of walking from room to room and a whole lot of waiting around thats how this shit goes. They make it sound good but it's ass. It fucking sucks
>>25631883Yes, war, poverty, addiction, cruelty, pain, and suffering are all shit to experience, this is Vollmann's entire thing
>>25631883Are you under the impression he was doing these things for funsies?
