Mon, Oct 12
William T. Vollmann, "A Table For Fortune"
Some writers you read; this one you survive. Seven volumes on violence, a National Book Award, a career spent walking into places where the reporting could plausibly have killed him - and he keeps turning up at bookstores with almost no ceremony, reading in a flat voice from pages he seems faintly embarrassed by. That contrast is why people who care about American letters clear a Monday for this. There is no version of Vollmann that comes packaged. He answers questions longer than the questions deserve, goes down tangents about trains and about the people he met on them, and treats a room of forty as though it were a room of four hundred or of four. The Los Feliz regulars have learned to bring the book they most want signed rather than the newest one, because he will sign anything and talks about the old work with more heat than the new. Free, RSVP requested, back room, folding chairs. For a certain kind of reader this is the single most interesting thing happening in Los Angeles on the second Monday of October, and almost nobody outside that reader knows it is happening.
Some writers you read; this one you survive. Seven volumes on violence, a National Book Award, a career spent walking into places where the reporting could plausibly have killed him - and he keeps turning up at bookstores with almost no ceremony, reading in a flat voice from pages he seems faintly embarrassed by. That contrast is why people who care about American letters clear a Monday for this. There is no version of Vollmann that comes packaged. He answers questions longer than the questions deserve, goes down tangents about trains and about the people he met on them, and treats a room of forty as though it were a room of four hundred or of four. The Los Feliz regulars have learned to bring the book they most want signed rather than the newest one, because he will sign anything and talks about the old work with more heat than the new. Free, RSVP requested, back room, folding chairs. For a certain kind of reader this is the single most interesting thing happening in Los Angeles on the second Monday of October, and almost nobody outside that reader knows it is happening.
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William T. Vollmann, "A Table For Fortune"
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Monday, October 12, 2026
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Some writers you read; this one you survive. Seven volumes on violence, a National Book Award, a career spent walking into places where the reporting could plausibly have killed him - and he keeps turning up at bookstores with almost no ceremony, reading in a flat voice from pages he seems faintly embarrassed by. That contrast is why people who care about American letters clear a Monday for this. There is no version of Vollmann that comes packaged. He answers questions longer than the questions deserve, goes down tangents about trains and about the people he met on them, and treats a room of forty as though it were a room of four hundred or of four. The Los Feliz regulars have learned to bring the book they most want signed rather than the newest one, because he will sign anything and talks about the old work with more heat than the new. Free, RSVP requested, back room, folding chairs. For a certain kind of reader this is the single most interesting thing happening in Los Angeles on the second Monday of October, and almost nobody outside that reader knows it is happening.
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