William T. Vollmann

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William T. Vollmann (2006)

William Tanner Vollmann (born July 28, 1959 in Los Angeles , California ) is an American novelist , journalist , short story writer and essayist .

Life

Vollmann studied at Deep Springs College and earned a bachelor's degree in comparative literature from Cornell University .

When Vollmann wrote his first novel You Bright and Risen Angels , he was working as a computer programmer . During the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan , he traveled to Afghanistan and wrote about the experience in An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World. He has published articles on travel in Spin Magazine and The New Yorker, and sometimes writes for the New York Times Book Review .

In early 2004, after much delay, McSweeney's Rising Up and Rising Down , a 3,300-page, seven-volume illustrated treatise on violence that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award , was published. An abridged one-volume edition was published by Ecco Press . Vollmann worked on it for over 20 years and tried to comprehensively investigate the causes and consequences of violence as well as the ethical issues associated with it. Much of the text consists of Vollmann's own reports on places full of violence such as Cambodia , Somalia and Iraq .

Vollmann's other works often deal with the settlement of North America, as in Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes , a cycle of seven novels, or with stories of people - often prostitutes - on the verge of war, poverty and hope.

His last novel, Europe Central , which deals with a variety of characters entangled in the battles between Germany and the Soviet Union , received the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction; its translation into German by Robin Detje was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2014.

Vollmann now lives in Sacramento , California.

criticism

Many critics praise the audacity and originality of his works, which often mix techniques of fictional and journalistic writing, as well as his immense knowledge and the beauty of his prose. Some reviewers have praised him for making the most of literature, while others find his writing pretentious and self-centered. Some think Vollmann's obsession with prostitutes borders on fetishism .

Works

  • Why I write; Flowers in hair; Incarnations of the murderer; The burning moth. William T. Vollmann in conversation with Larry McCaffery in: writing booklet , no. 55 (2000).
  • Afghanistan Picture Show or How I Learned to Save the World. Marebuchverlag, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-936384-10-X (German by Peter Torberg ).
    • Paperback edition with the title: Afghanistan Picture Show or How I saved the world. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-45940-9 .
  • Whores for Gloria. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-518-41747-9 .
  • Hobo blues. An American night picture. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-42019-5 .
  • Fukushima exclusion zone . A report. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-06210-4 .
  • Europe Central. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-42368-4 (translated by Robin Detje ).
  • Poor people. Reports. , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-518-07361-2 (translated by Robin Detje).
  • Carbon ideologies . 2 volumes. No Immediate Danger ; No good alternative . Viking, 2018

Web links

Interviews

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ “ In 'Europe Central', alongside Shostakovich , the artists Käthe Kollwitz and Anna Andrejewna Achmatowa , the filmmaker Roman Karmen , the SS man Kurt Gerstein and the Wehrmacht General Friedrich Paulus appear . Together with them Vollmann once again wades through the morass of a century, fails with the ' Operation Barbarossa ' in the conquest of Stalingrad , gassed the Jews in Belzec and Treblinka and lived through the cynical everyday life in socialism . "From the review by Thomas Andre: " Mammut novel 'Europe Central': The murderous century " , SPIEGEL-Online, April 17, 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Vollmann, William T.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vollmann, William Tanner (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 28, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Los Angeles , California