Shadows of Love, Shadows of Loneliness: Volume One

William T. Vollmann is the author of ten novels, including Whores for Gloria, The Royal Family, and Europe Central, which won the National Book Award. He has also written four collections of stories (including The Rainbow Stories and The Atlas, which won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction), a memoir, and eight works of nonfiction, including Rising Up and Rising Down and Imperial, both of which were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in California.

"He is the maximalist’s maximalist, a PEZ dispenser of career-capping megavolumes. His books are less straight novels or stories or histories than genre-obliterating monuments to his obsessions: sex, love, violence, justice, gonzo travel, and (most notoriously) prostitution. (‘We’re a culture of prostitutes,’ he once told an interviewer.) He is both outlandishly bookish and hellaciously worldly: a haunter of archives but also a one-man literary Peace Corps."—Sam Anderson, NY Magazine"And the suggestion that he could win the Nobel Prize is not at all outlandish, for Vollmann may be the most ambitious, audacious writer working in America today."—Alex Nazaryan, Newsweek"Vollmann is a writer of considerable talent, with an encyclopedic urge to document overheard conversations, bar-stool autobiographies, lumpen manifestoes and mad soliloquies, and an itch to tell the story of the world and its people in unprecedented ways."—Laura Miller, The New York Times"Bill is such a unique and interesting writer that it’s always fascinating to have a look at something he’s done...his enormous range, his intellect, his deep hunger for fully researching a story and telling it from many different sides."—Paul Slovak, Vulture"It has always seemed that Vollmann is a writer not of this time or place. So mysterious are his motivations, so sweeping are his interests, so prodigious is his production, so vastly different is the thing he does from the thing everyone else does that he may actually be a visitor from another dimension come to report comprehensively back to his home planet."—Mark Warren, Esquire"An uncompromising visionary drawn to equally uncompromising material...though he has mellowed as a man, his subject matter has, if anything, grown even more confrontational."—Tom Bissell, The New Republic