A Table for Fortune: Box Set

“[A] heroic, fascinating and important work.”—Tom LeClair, The New York Times

In A Table for Fortune, National Book Award–winner William T. Vollmann depicts the last half-century of American politics, war, and life in this four-part, 3,000+ page novel that is at once a family drama, bildungsroman, and national epic.

Volumes 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 saga 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 Volumes 3 and 4 is Matthew Stevens, Elliott's son, whose efforts to escape his parents and divine the fate of his life result in homelessness, addiction, and perhaps even happiness.

Spanning from 1968 to 2019, these volumes comb together––with Vollmann's 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. 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.

William Tanner Vollmann (born July 28, 1959) is an American novelist, journalist, war correspondent, short story writer, and essayist. He won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction for the novel Europe Central. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife and daughter.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Øystein Vidnes (http://www.flickr.com/photos/oysteinv/160077312/) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Praise for William T. Vollmann

“[A] heroic, fascinating and important work.”—Tom LeClair, The New York Times

"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