A daring literary masterpiece and winner of the National Book Award In this magnificent work of fiction, acclaimed author William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye on the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century to render a mesmerizing perspective on human experience during wartime. Through interwoven narratives that paint a composite portrait of these two battling leviathans and the monstrous age they defined, Europe Central captures a chorus of voices both real and fictional— a young German who joins the SS to fight its crimes, two generals who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the Stalinist assaults upon his work and life.

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.

That was the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asked in cities and villages around the globe. The result of Vollmann's fearless inquiry is a view of poverty unlike any previously offered. Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and quiet resignation, allowing the poor to explain the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms. With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing eye, Vollmann invites his readers to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience. Some images that appeared in the print edition of this book are unavailable in the electronic edition due to rights reasons.

From the author of Europe Central, winner of the National Book Award, a journalistic tour de force along the Mexican-American border – a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award For generations of migrant workers, Imperial Country has held the promise of paradise and the reality of hell. It sprawls across a stirring accidental sea, across the deserts, date groves and labor camps of Southeastern California, right across the border into Mexico. In this eye-opening book, William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, exploring polluted rivers and guarded factories and talking with everyone from Mexican migrant workers to border patrolmen. Teeming with patterns, facts, stories, people and hope, this is an epic study of an emblematic region.

Recounting his journey through war-torn Afghanistan, the author describes the orphans, refugees, guerrilla leaders, bureaucrats, corrupt officials, and has-been politicians in the region

This stunning new collection of stories confirms William T. Vollmann's growing reputation as the American writer whose books tower over the work of his contemporaries by virtue of their enormous range, huge ambition, stylistic daring, wide learning, audacious innovation, and sardonic wit (Washington Post Book World). All these qualities are in evidence in this collection in which the character of the writer and that of some of his intimates - both real and imaginary - surface and resurface in a series of extraordinary situations and encounters. Two astonishing stories frame this collection. The first, The Ghost of Magnetism, tells about a young man leaving San Francisco to become a sort of literary hobo living on his freeze-dried memories. The last, The Grave of Lost Stories, describes the death of Poe in a fungus-encrusted tomb somewhere deep in the earth. Here is the colorful and disreputable group of people familiar to us from Vollmann's earlier fiction - pimps, tramps, pornographers, witch doctors and massage-parlor girls. Within these stories, Vollmann gives us one of the most searching, bizarre, and subversive views of America today.

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.

The debut novel from award-winning filmmaker Rohith S. Katbamna, tells the powerful story of a brave few who venture for truth in the aftermath of a global uprising. In the year 2027, society has fallen. Mass revolts and warring nations have claimed countless lives and destroyed vast lands. Forced into a dark slumber, the world now draws fewer breaths and hosts infinite graveyards. In England, ten survivors who have journeyed many miles are on a path ready to converge. With histories soaked in the blood of betrayal, lies and deceit, one common thread binds them. The human instinct to seek a greater truth. Over six days, these ten souls will come to find that the ruined world around them is reawakening. As a presence emerges, bringing with it a merciless intention to eliminate any and all beating bodies, this company of strangers will confront a series of hardships in a tale of underdogs, oppressors and the human condition. Down and Rising is an immersive reading experience. An imaginative multi-story arc intricately woven together by striking imagery, reference materials and finely crafted characters.