A Table for Fortune
Box Set
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In A Table for Fortune, National Book Award-winner William T. Vollmann depicts from the balcony-level of history the last half-century of American politics, war, and life. At once a family drama, bildungsroman, and national epic, this 3,000+ page, four-part novel may be our most ambitious writer's most ambitious work.
Parts 1 and 2 gather from the half-forgotten annals of the near-past -- Stasi documents, Iraqi newspaper articles, presidential radio addresses -- to form a vivid and mesmeric epic centered on Elliott Stevens, or DAVE, a CIA analyst whose glee at winning the Cold War is matched only by the dread that culminates in the nightmares of September eleventh and the resulting War on Terror. The hero of Parts 3 and 4 is Matthew Stevens, Elliott's son, whose efforts to divine the fate of his life and escape his parents result in homelessness, addiction, and perhaps even happiness.
Spanning from 1968 to 2019, these volumes comb together -- with Vollmann's trademark generous wit and Olympian prose -- a staggeringly well-researched, definitive history of American post-war foreign policy with a deft, moving chronicle of a family's descent into resentment and gloom. Not since War and Peace have the internal lives of characters and the history of a nation been forged together in so forceful a study of causes, fate, and nationhood.
Elliott and Matthew Stevens are "passengers within a divine bullet," which, like Gogol's troika before it, overtakes all flying to its nation's end. This boxed set, with all four volumes in hardcover, allows the book to be read as intended: as one towering novel, the magnum opus of one of the giants of literature.
About this Author
William T. Vollmann is the author of twelve novels, including 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 ten 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 Writers Award and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harpers, Esquire, Granta, and many other publications. He lives in Sacramento, California.
Reviews
Praise for William T. Vollmann
"Resembles War and Peace not merely in its scope, but in its perception of history as a determining force that individual lives merely illustrate . . . Aspires to the highest possible potential of literature."
- Melvin Jules Bukiet, Los Angeles Times
"Profound . . . Vollmann asks us to put aside what we think we know of history and immerse ourselves in it once again."
- John Freeman, The Boston Globe
"You don't go to Vollmann for structure or old-fashioned storytelling; you go to Vollmann for the sentences, the mood, the experience. You go to Vollmann for the same reason certain people chase storms."
- Tom Bissell, The New Republic
"Full of terror and pity, Vollmann's narratives go back beyond tragedy to the historical mastery of epic."
- National Book Award judges
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