The AtlasIn 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. |
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THE ATLAS
User Review - Jane Doe - KirkusMaking a bid for the bleakest book of the year, Vollmann (Butterfly Stories, 1993, etc.) fashions a world-wide web of despair in a palindrome of 53 stories, each having to do with sorrow or loss, and ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - darwin.8u - LibraryThingHe is truly an amazing writer. This is not his strongest work, but is representative of what he probably could produce while you were finishing watching the DVD edition of 24, Season 2. More prolific ... Read full review
Contents
OPENING THE BOOK | 3 |
ARE YOU ALL RIGHT? | 11 |
AN OLD MAN IN OLD GRAYISH | 17 |
Copyright | |
22 other sections not shown
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Bibliographic information
| Title | The Atlas |
| Author | William T. Vollmann |
| Edition | illustrated, reprint |
| Publisher | Viking, 1996 |
| Original from | the University of Michigan |
| Digitized | Mar 14, 2008 |
| ISBN | 0670865788, 9780670865789 |
| Length | 459 pages |
| Subjects | › Fiction / Literary Fiction / Short Stories (single author) |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |