Maxima Library

Audacious. Wildly ambitious. Prolific. All describe William T. Vollmann, author of the seven-volume nonfiction work Rising Up and Rising Down and “Seven Dreams” sequence of novels, which the Chicago Tribune hailed as “likely to become one of the masterpieces of the century.”

In Europe Central, Vollmann presents a mesmerizing series of intertwined paired stories that compare and contrast the moral decisions made by various figures — some famous, some infamous, some unknown — associated with the warring authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century. He conjures up two generals, one Russian and one German, who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons and with different results. Another pairing tells of two heroes — a female Russian partisan martyred at the beginning of World War II and a young German man who joins the SS in order to reveal its secrets and halt its crimes. Several stories concern the complex and elusive Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the Stalinist assaults against his work and life; also explored are the fates of artists and poets such as Käthe Kollwitz, Anna Akhmatova, and the documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen. Europe Central is another high-wire act of fiction by a writer of prodigious talent.

Just weeks after multiple disasters struck Japan, National Book Award winner William T. Vollmann ventures into the nuclear hot zone, outfitted only with rubber kitchen gloves, a cloth facemask, and a capricious radiation detector. In this Byliner Original from the new digital publisher Byliner, Vollmann emerges with a haunting report on daily life in a now-ravaged Japan — a country he has known and loved for many years. And in the cities and towns hit hardest by the earthquake, tsunami, and radioactive contamination, Vollmann finds troubling omens of a future heading toward us all.

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.

Here in one marvellous volume, is the cream of erotic writing from all the corners of the globe. Maxim Jakubowski has gathered together unexpurgated delights, new and unpublished gems, and classic masterpieces seldom seen before.

Come play in a garden of exotic and erotic writing, with origins ranging from France and Germany to Japan and New Zealand, from Russia to the United States and Canada.