The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann's Battle to Publish an Epic (2025)

3 days ago (metropolitanreview.org)

Vollmann seems amazingly prolific, 'writing by the yard' as one of the editors put it. I've ordered the first volume of The Carbon Ideologies to see what the sentences and paragraphs are like, how it sounds.

PS: Is it really that expensive to licence specific fonts at book publisher scale?

Wow Bill on the front page! For what it’s worth, he’s the only author who has written me back after I sent him a note through USPS. He’s a fascinating, charitable thinker with a multifaceted oeuvre and this text will be a profound addition to it.

I read his Europe Central last year. It was a challenging read, but I came out of it knowing more about Shostakovich’s (alleged) sex life. And other neat WWII stuff, too.