Last Stories and Other Stories
William T Vollmann
Language: English
Pages: 704
ISBN: 0670015970
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Supernaturally tinged stories from William T. Vollmann, author of the National Book Award winner Europe Central
In this magnificent new work of fiction, his first in nine years, celebrated author William T. Vollmann offers a collection of ghost stories linked by themes of love, death, and the erotic.
A Bohemian farmer’s dead wife returns to him, and their love endures, but at a gruesome price. A geisha prolongs her life by turning into a cherry tree. A journalist, haunted by the half-forgotten killing of a Bosnian couple, watches their story, and his own wartime tragedy, slip away from him. A dying American romances the ghost of his high school sweetheart while a homeless salaryman in Tokyo animates paper cutouts of ancient heroes.
Are ghosts memories, fantasies, or monsters? Is there life in death? Vollmann has always operated in the shadowy borderland between categories, and these eerie tales, however far-flung their settings, all focus on the attempts of the living to avoid, control, or even seduce death. Vollmann’s stories will transport readers to a fantastical world where love and lust make anything possible.
been dead for eighteen years, with the paint going grey on her rotting house, which no one could afford to buy; and several prominent men had erected a statue of Loden Gudmundsson, who inspired the rational modernization of timbercutting in this part of Rogaland. Around his gravestone the earth appeared especially disturbed. Feeling called upon to disprove a rumor that certain graves had been tampered with, the sexton fetched a crowbar, which turned out to be unnecessary in Loden’s case, since
What you don’t understand, said Ingrid, is that any help I gave you would only make it worse. 2 The cormorant-trapper’s daughter warmed me in her bed, beat the dirt out of my clothes, fed me the best she had, saw me to the door, kissed me, and for a parting token gave me a twisting arm-snake of good red gold. I thanked her with all my heart. I’ve spoken with the swans, she said, and it seems that swan-shirts are even rarer than they used to be. I wish you’d take mine; it would save so much
tombs. The gnarled arms of that tree pointed toward every grave, and afternoon fell almost into dusk. A single white blossom sped down like a spider parachuting down his newest thread. Then my ears began to ring—death’s call. So I ran away. I sat in my room and hid. Looking out my window, I spied death prising up boards and pouring vinegar on nails. Death killed a dog. What if I were next? 2 Not daring to lose time, I decided to seek a humbler grave. And right down the superhighway, past the
fighter carefully wrote in the American’s notebook: MPs in BiH is the only MPs fronting the frontlines at all fronts.— Thank you, he said. Then Dragica and a girl named Aida were trying to educate him about the sounds of bullets, and Aida said, opening her pinkish-silver-painted fingernails (they still had cosmetics that autumn): Of course it’s different when a sniper shoots and when a pistol shoots, because when a sniper shoots it’s a longer hissing.— By then he had built up a certain opinion of
hobbies include the arranging of marriages, once proposed her to Rossetti’s consideration, but he said: You know, cara, the thing is, I have a bitter disposition. That’s why I need someone soft and yielding. I’m not saying a stone woman can’t be forgiving; for instance, look at you, still smiling, with that bloodstained forehead! But you’re not, how should I say, available . . .—nor would he have wished her to be; although he had several times been tempted by the exaggerated frozen gazes of the