{"product_id":"last-stories-and-other-stories-isbn-9780143127567","title":"Last Stories and Other Stories","description":"\u003cb\u003eSupernaturally tinged stories from William T. Vollmann, author of the National Book Award winner \u003ci\u003eEurope Central\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eWatch for Vollmann’s new work of nonfiction, \u003ci\u003eNo Immediate Danger\u003c\/i\u003e, coming in April of 2018\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 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.Praise for \u003ci\u003eLast Stories and Other Stories\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Mysterious, magical. . .nightmarish, beautiful. . .Vollmann is an exquisite magician of a baroque stylistic obscurity that changes the reader slowly but surely. . .these troubled, voluptuous narratives are deeply concerned with the bewildering effects of trauma and loss. . .the book took reading and rereading for me, just as an intensely odd, seductive love song asks to be heard again and again.  But Vollmann is a great storyteller, and the weird aurality is a critical part of these tales.”—Kate Bernheimer, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Transporting [and] bizarrely beautiful. . .[these stories] call to mind no living writers, summoning instead Calvino, Marquez, Kafka. . .So mysterious are Vollmann’s motivations, so sweeping his interests, so prodigious is his production, so vastly different is the thing he does from the thing that everyone else does that he may actually be a visitor from another dimension come to report comprehensively back to his home planet.” – \u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A phantasmagoric book, blending bits of Lovecraft and Dreiser, David Foster Wallace and Scheherazade, Poe and the Brothers Grimm. . .builds to a suite of love stories, intended not to shock the unshockable but to trace the far reaches of this author’s obsessions with sex and death.” – \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Every story leaves someone behind, and so loss in itself, whether violent or beautiful, becomes an unrelenting thematic constant.  In another writer’s hands this would seem like a gloomy trudge, but Vollmann invigorates the subject with folkloric swashbuckling bluster. . .at best, the stories are odd, transportive, and of the blackest humor.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Los Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Don’t be afraid of the bricklike mass of this collection, or of Vollmann’s forbidding reputation.  Fear only the spectres and vampires that invest these 32 stories with highbrow goth.”—\u003ci\u003eNew York Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“There are ghost and horror stories here, parables, tales, and tender, more memoiristic stories, all enriched by Vollmann’s travels to the Balkans, Scandinavia, Japan, Trieste, Bohemia, Buenos Aires, Mexico.  It’s less a story collection than a dozen interrelated mini-novels wrapped around various continents.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A sprawling, enchanting casket of curiosities. . .these stories range from novella-length to just a single paragraph.  In their elegant, elegiac meditations on death and the afterlife, we cross broad terrain, including geishas in ancient Japan, vampires in preindustrial Bohemia, and bombings in modern-day Sarajevo.”—\u003ci\u003eAtlantic.com\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Vollmann’s fiction has always defied easy categorization. Here, he straddles, twists, and morphs action-adventure, horror, political thriller, fantasy, and literary fiction. What gives the book coherence is his singular style:  elaborate and picaresque, with a rich vocabulary. . .Mainstays of horror and the supernatural figure prominently, and it’s especially exciting to read these pop-fiction conventions treated with Vollmann’s narrative richness.”—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Creatively sourced, boldly imagined, and incandescently written supernatural stories. . .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.”—\u003ci\u003eALA Booklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e William T. Vollmann is the author of ten novels, including \u003ci\u003eEurope Central\u003c\/i\u003e, which won the National Book Award.  He has also written four collections of stories, including \u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eAtlas\u003c\/i\u003e, which won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a memoir, and six works of nonfiction, including \u003ci\u003eRising Up and Rising Down\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eImperial\u003c\/i\u003e, both of which were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  His journalism and fiction have been published in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHarpers\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eGranta\u003c\/i\u003e, and many other publications.\u003cb\u003eLISTENING TO THE SHELLS \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e1\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the dimming living room they were drinking slivovitz and water out of fine crystal glasses, and everyone was laughing and smoking American cigarettes until a shell fell twenty-five meters away. The women jumped. Another shell fell slightly closer and the women screamed. Then the people sat silently smoking in the last light, their smoke nearly the same color as the drinking glasses, and presently began to laugh again, leaning over their hands or spreading their fingers; they stubbed out their cigarettes in crystal ashtrays, and the poet who loved Vesna even suspected that finally he had found life. But Enko the militiaman sat glaring. Now it was dark, with echoes of the last light fading from the bubbles of mineral water just within the glasses and from the women’s pale blouses, and they sat in silence, listening to the shells.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen a shell approaches closely, you may well hear a hiss before it strikes. Once it does, you will be deafened for a minute or two, during which time you are not good for much except to wait for another shell. Meanwhile you see what they call \u003ci\u003ethe big light.\u003c\/i\u003e After that you can hear the screams of children.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVesna’s best friend Mirjana had had two little boys, and a shell killed them both. A shell had sheared away the tree in front of Vesna’s apartment; the smash had been so loud that she was certain she must be wounded.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMirjana said: Marinko has a car but no petrol. Do you know where he can get petrol?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAsk Enko, said Vesna.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEnko said nothing.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSmiling brightly, Mirjana tried to light another cigarette. The match-flame trembled between her fingers and went out. Vesna leaned toward her, so that they could touch their cigarettes together. People still had plenty of tobacco at that time. In a couple of years they would be smoking green tea.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVesna said: It’s quiet now, thanks to God!\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the corner sat Enko with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and his police ID clinking on its neck-chain. He had pulled off his bulletproof vest, which was leaning against the wall in easy reach. Every now and then his hand touched the grip of his gun in the holster; then he swigged from the crystal glass and took another drag; finally he pulled off his now ridiculous sunglasses, his head turning rapidly as he listened to his comrade Amir, who leaned forward as if anticipating something, all the while touching his moustache with a ringed forefinger. No one else could hear their conversation. Enko’s cigarette burned steadily between two fingers as he raised it again, tapping his foot, and his face was young and hard.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e2\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAmir rose, gazed out the window into the greenish darkness, then went out.— He knows how to get American whiskey, Enko explained.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVesna said: Enko, can you tell me where Marinko can buy some petrol?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWho’s Marinko?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDidn’t you meet him? I thought you did. He’s Mirjana’s cousin.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEnko locked his bleak eyes on Mirjana. He said: Where are you from anyway?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLook, I’m Sarajevan, just like you.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGreat. Now what part of town are you from?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHer children are all killed, Vesna explained. From now she has none.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWho the fuck cares? said Enko. What do you need petrol for?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMy cousin wants it. I don’t ask him his business.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEnko laughed.— Sure, he said. I can get him as much petrol as he wants.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe’ll be grateful to you.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGratitude doesn’t do much for me, said Enko.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e3\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen Amir came back with the whiskey, he informed Enko that there was a lost American journalist at the Holiday Inn.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt the Holiday Inn, journalists were smoking quietly around marble tables in the dark. Across the river a machine gun chortled like a night bird. Enko found the lost American and quickly uncovered his particulars: He had no idea what he wanted, and he could pay a hundred fifty Deutschemarks per day—not nearly as much as any television reporter, let alone a sexy anchorwoman such as Christiane Amanpour, but whatever they could get out of him would be easy money, and his pockets might be deeper than he said. Amir, who had recently inherited an almost new Stojadin automobile, would be the driver, billing by the hour; while Enko would babysit the journalist at, for instance, a hundred fifty Deutschemarks a day. Amir and Enko knew that everything is negotiable, while the journalist knew that when one might be killed this very hour, all money is play money. So the three contracting parties quickly achieved agreement, Enko staring into the American’s face while Amir drummed fingers on the tabletop as if he knew of more lucrative projects elsewhere, which indeed he did.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA man in a flak jacket and helmet strutted by, with his tape recorder’s light glowing red. At another table, some functionary from Municipality Centar was assuring a French journalist: Everything will be solved by winter. Everything must be, or there will be hundreds and thousands dead.— The Frenchman nodded delightedly. Now he could file his story.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe American journalist was encumbered by a pair of binoculars for which he would never have any purpose. Enko told him: I sure could use your binoculars.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe’ll see, said the American vaguely. Maybe at the end . . .\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEight-o’-clock, said Amir to the American. Goodbye.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSee you then, the American said. Well, Enko, can I buy you another drink?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSure. By the way, I’m counting on those binoculars.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis building across the street, are there snipers in it? asked a very young British journalist in a worried voice.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOh, no, they’ve cleaned it! his handler assured him.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEnko knew the handler, who was a sonofabitch and had once stolen away from him a very pretty Swedish correspondent. He therefore leaned across his enemy and explained to the British journalist, as if out of helpfulness: But there’s a sniper shooting at the other entrance. You don’t use that.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNow the lost American was looking even more lost, just as Enko had intended. He needed to be reminded that Enko could ditch him at any time. As a matter of fact, Enko was a man of his word. He would never do less than he had contracted to do, and often he would do more. But it was bad business to reveal that at the beginning.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe light continued to fail. Looking out the front windows, which happened to be lacking a few ovals and triangles, the journalists stared at blue sky, and at that silent building across the street.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnother drink? said the American.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEnko began to feel sorry for him.— There’s a party if you want to come.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat time?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNow.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHow will I get back?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo one expects you to go out by yourself, said Enko contemptuously. He rose, pulled his bulletproof vest down over his head and strapped it tight across his sides.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e4\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the windows those shards of bluish twilight sky were already colder, and now the clouds swam in.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe lights had come on in the parking garage. All was noiseless. They emerged into the grey light, which was dulling down with dust and a little rain, Enko already half flooring the accelerator as they screeched around the protected corner and into the sniper’s reach. Across the street, the journalist glimpsed a building with four rows of windows visible, grey and black like ice against the pale tan façade. Metal was chattering, but not here. Almost biting his lip, his shoulders hunched as if that could somehow diminish his vulnerability, Enko wrenched the car around another corner; now they were rushing past yellow walls into the Stari Grad; there was dust, chalk and broken glass on the sidewalk.— That’s from right now, explained Enko, perhaps enjoying himself.— Just then, more glass departed windows, smashing on the street. The journalist sat quietly in the passenger seat. He excelled at being calm when he was powerless.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEnko demanded: What do you think about those fucking Chetniks?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMurderers, said the journalist.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTemporarily satisfied, Enko said: A few days ago a man was killed in front of the President’s palace. We tried to help him, but he was already bloody. The trail of blood went more than a thousand meters. Here’s where she lives.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWho?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVesna. When you get out you don’t need to run, but I’m telling you, pay attention and move your ass.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAll right.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWait a second. Inbound. Shut up. \u003ci\u003eShut up.\u003c\/i\u003e No, we’re fine.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs they trotted away from the car, they heard the shell explode.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the dark landing between the first two flights of steps, Enko said: How about a cash advance?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSure, said the journalist. How much?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive me fifty.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJust a minute. Here it is.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFine. Now, Vesna, she’s open-minded. She won’t care that I brought you. And there’s chicks galore, hot chicks. Not that they’d be especially interested in a guy like you, but maybe you’ll get lucky.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOkay.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnother thing. Anybody asks what you’re paying me or if you’re paying me, that’s only \u003ci\u003emy\u003c\/i\u003e business.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI won’t say a word.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI wish you’d have brought those binoculars. I wanted to show them off.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVesna’s door was open. As they entered the apartment, which was foggy with cigarette smoke, they heard many people, and far away a machine gun fired three bursts. A woman laughed very loudly.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLook! cried Mirjana. I was wondering when you’d get here. Who’s that?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJust some American, said Enko.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd this is from my cousin, for the petrol. You’d better count it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI don’t need to count it. If he shorted me, that’s his problem.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThanks for helping him.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWell, he owes me. Who’s that girl over there?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302843601125,"sku":"NP9780143127567","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780143127567.jpg?v=1767731178","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/last-stories-and-other-stories-isbn-9780143127567","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}