From the acclaimed author of The Rainbow Stories, The Ice Shirt, and Fathers and Crows comes this fever dream of a novel about an alcoholic Vietnam veteran, Jimmy, who devotes his government check and his waking hours to the search for a beautiful and majestic street whore, a woman who may or may not exist save in Jimmy's rambling dreams. Gloria's image seems distilled from memory and fantasy and the fragments of whatever Jimmy can buy from the other whores: their sex, their stories—all the unavailing dreams of love and salvation among the drinkers and addicts who haunt San Francisco's Tenderloin District.

In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus lay on his deathbed, reportedly holding his just-published masterpiece, The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, in his hands. Placing the sun at the center of the universe, Copernicus launched modern science, leading to a completely new understanding of the universe, and humanity's place within it. But what did Copernicus really believe? Some argue that he anticipated the vast secularizing impact his ideas would have on history. Others contend that Copernicus was a man of his time and, on the whole, accepted its worldview. William T. Vollmann navigates this territory with the energetic prose and powerful intelligence for which he is known, providing a fresh and enlightening explication of Copernicus, his book, and his time, and the momentous clash between them.

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.

Henry Tyler is a failing private detective in San Francisco. When the love of his life, a Korean-American woman named Irene—who happens to be married to his brother John—commits suicide, he clings despairingly to her ghost. Struggling to turn grief and guilt into something precious, he employs his professional skills to track down the supernatural Queen of the Prostitutes, who first gives him a "false Irene" (in reality a heroin-poisoned whore), and then herself. While Henry lives his new life of nightmare beauty and degradation, John defends himself against Irene's memory by means of stoic blindness. John is an ambitious young contract lawyer, and one of his most lucrative projects is to draw up the paperwork for a mysterious establishment in Las Vegas called Feminine Circus, whose proprietor just happens to be hunting for the Queen.

Vaulting through time to another flashpoint in the long struggle between Indians and Europeans, William T. Vollmann's visionary fictional history now focuses on the white explorers of the mid-1800s, desperately dreaming of forging a Northwest Passage. As Sir John Franklin embarks on his fourth Arctic voyage, he defies the warnings of the native people, and his journey ends in ice and death. But his spirit lingers in the Canadian north, where 150 years later, in 1990, Inuit elders dream of long-gone seal-hunting days and teenagers sniff gasoline. And when a white man seduces and leaves pregnant a young Indian woman, he becomes Franklin reincarnated, bound for the same fate. Vollmann's vivid characters and landscapes weave together the stories of the past and present to live out America's ongoing tragedy of greed, ignorance, and violence. Volume 6 of the Seven Dreams series.

From a writer who has won comparison with Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs comes thirteen unnerving and often breathtaking stories populated by punks and angels, skinheads and religious assassins, streetwalkers and fetishists—people who live outside the law and and the clear light of the every day. Set in landscapes as diverse as ancient Babylon, India, and the seamy underbelly of San Francisco, these daring and innovative tales are laced with Vollman's fertile imagination. The Rainbow Stories ushers us into a world that bears an awful yet hypnotic resemblance to that of our deepest nightmares, confirming Vollman's reputation as a dark visionary of contemporary fiction.

The time is the tenth century A.D. The newcomers are a proud and bloody-minded people whose kings once changed themselves into wolves. The Norse have advanced as implacably as a glacier from Iceland to the wastes of Greenland, and from there to the place they call Vinland the Good. The natives are a bronze-skinned race who have not yet discovered iron and still see themselves as part of nature. As William T. Vollmann tells the converging stories of these two peoples and of the Norsewomen Freydis and Gudrid, whose venomous rivalry brings frost into paradise, he creates a tour-de-force of speculative history, a vivid amalgam of Icelandic saga, Inuit creation myth, and contemporary travel writing that yields a new and utterly original vision of our continent and its past. Volume 1 of the Seven Dreams series.

William T. Vollmann has travelled to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan with Islamic commandos, shivered out a solitary stretch at the North Magnetic Pole in winter, hopped freight trains, studied the stately ancient beauties of Japanese Noh theater, and made friends with street prostitutes all over the world—all in the interest of learning a little more about life. Now in his mid-fifties, Vollmann sets out on what may well be impossible for a heterosexual genetic male: to envision himself as a woman.

In these photographs, block prints, and watercolor drawings, he portrays his alter ego, Dolores, with whimsicality, and sometimes with cruelty—for Dolores would like to be attractive, or at least to “pass,” but the ageing male body in which she remains confined requires lowered expectations. Meanwhile, the drawings and block prints, composed with the artist’s glasses off, show Dolores as she imagines herself to be. The Book of Dolores brings the genre of self-portraits to a new level of vulnerability and bravery. In the process, it offers virtuoso performances of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century photographic techniques, including the seductively difficult gum bichromate method. Each section of the book is accompanied by an essay on motives and techniques.

Set in locales from Phnom Penh to Sarajevo, Mogadishu to New York, and provocatively combining autobiography with invention, fantasy with reportage, these stories examine poverty, violence, and loss even as they celebrate the beauty of landscape, the thrill of the alien, the infinitely precious pain of love. The Atlas brings to life a fascinating array of human beings: an old Inuit walrus-hunter, urban aborigines in Sydney, a crack-addicted prostitute, and even Vollmann himself.

A labor of seventeen years, Vollmann's first book of nonfiction since 1992's An Afghanistan Picture Show is a gravely urgent invitation to look back at the world's long, bloody path and find some threads of meaning, wisdom, and guidance to plot a moral course. From the street violence of prostitutes and junkies to the centuries-long battles between the Native Americans and European colonists,Vollmann's mesmerizing imagery and compelling logic is presented with authority born of astounding research and personal experience.