Wiliam T. Vollmann

Reading "The Royal Family" at the moment. The guy sure knows how to write but it feels (at least as far as I am reading) scattershot as fuck. It feels like he has just put in paper everysingle great combination of words (great combinations, anyway) that he could think of. I have a similar sensation while reading Gass, it seems like these people just want to be genius and are trying as hard as they can to be. I like (again, so far) Vollmann style better, he seems like a very passionate writer, someone who truly loves this. He's interesting, to say the least.

>>9581553
Really accurate

Good prose stylist, uninteresting overall

DFW is superior

>>9581542
Hack wannabe Pynchon.

>>9581745
Vollmann is too sincere and passionate to be imitating Pynchon. I actually don't think he fits in well with his contemporaries for that reason, his sincerity makes him somewhat of an outlier of the whole postmodernist movement (or at least an alternative to its often bitter cynicism).

I like his non-fiction. i like his almost infantile joy in life juxtaposed with prostitutes, junky's and general lowlifes that inhabit his work

>>9581542
Does anyone have the Father's and crows on epub or pdf?

>DUDE WHORES AND CROSSDRESSERS LMAO

>>9581542
Europe Central was pretty great.

Third-rate Pynchon desperate to impress with quantity rather than quality. Critics taken in by sheer volume: 20 books written before the age of 50, including Rising Up and Rising Down, 3,300 pages; Europe Central, 811 pages; The Royal Family, 780 pages; Imperial, 1,344 pages. Grist for dissertation mills, intends not to be read but admired, motivated by the same incessant logorrhea as David Kirby and Albert Goldbarth in poetry. Consistent strain of misogynist sadomasochism overlooked by awed critics. Hunting down prostitutes (especially Southeast Asian prostitutes) has been uber-nerdish preoccupation, both in life and writing. Stepped into the breach left by Pynchon's long silences, determined to churn out a full Pynchon a year. Encapsulates ethical vacuity of American fiction after the collapse of 1970s postmodernism. Any moral meaning is buried in indigestible compendiums of graceless sentences. His few readable pieces are those heavily edited by conventional magazines (such as his Taliban piece edited 40 times by the New Yorker). Intentionally kills narrative with digression, to prove his superiority over other writers. His travel books follow Orientalist conventions--the coy outsiderness--despite his radical pomo self-image. Myth of Vollmann the Nobelist has been assiduously cultivated--by himself! Among his notes to his poor Viking editor, Paul Slovak, on being advised to cut his books: "I actually believe I have a shot at winning the Nobel Prize"; "Almost never do I read the final product"; "I believe that this book is worthy of standing in the shadow of Gibbon"; "It should be classed in the canon of great books."

Is there a place where I can find pdfs of his work, in particular EC? I've been meaning to dabble with Vollmann but can't find any dabbling material.

>>9581969
>http://gen.lib.rus.ec/