Last Stories and Other Stories
*Starred Review* A resolute global traveler and writer of conscience, Vollmann seeks to hold the whole world in his heart, and, consequently, his books are capacious, highly charged, and tempestuously human. Vollmann’s first work of fiction since his National Book Award–winning novel, Europe Central (2005), follows a half-dozen nonfiction books and contains 32 creatively sourced, boldly imagined, and incandescently written supernatural stories. Vollmann begins with several autobiographically leaning tales of besieged Sarajevo, where an American freelance journalist opens himself to the anguish of others. Eighteenth-century Trieste is the setting for “The Treasure of Jovo Cirtovich,” a gorgeously baroque and spooky epic featuring a wealthy Serbian merchant whose success is orchestrated by a strange entity. “The Trench Ghost” is a surreal antiwar story. Mexico is the inspiration for several mythic tales staggering in their scope and heat, one depicting the doomed Emperor Maximilian, another the voraciously lustful La Llorona, a spirit of raw female power. On to nineteenth-century Norway and a bizarre and harrowing immigration saga, which is followed by elegantly eerie ghost stories of Japan shaped by Vollmann’s fascination with Noh theater. Throughout this ingeniously fabulist, erotic, musing, and satirical treasury, Vollmann gives monstrous and alluring form to the forces that haunt us, from desire and love to regret and loss, as he contemplates with ardor, sorrow, bemusement, and wonder the beauty and terror of life and death and the vast mystery of the hereafter.       HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Vollmann is a media magnet as well as an exceptional writer, and his latest departure from the expected will be supported by an author tour and a major publicity campaign. --Donna Seaman