Last Stories and other Stories

Resumen del libro

A collection of supernaturally-tinged short stories from William T. Vollmann his first new work of fiction since Europe Central, winner of the 2005 National Book Award

A man with a fondness for supernatural lovers enters into a relationship with a green-skinned woman that has vines growing out of her. A bronze statue comes to life on the streets of eighteenth-century Treiste and goes looking for romance. A nineteenth-century Norwegian couple books passage to the New World on a strange ship that keeps getting smaller and smaller in size as their journey progresses. The ghost of a soldier killed in Italy during World War I rises out of the ground and plays war games with his toy soldiers. A young doctoral candidate in contemporary Veracruz takes up with the indigenous mistress of the explorer Cortez. A middle aged man with a terminal illness makes regular evening visits to a local cemetery to converse with the ghost of the first lover (now deceased) he had when he was seventeen years old.

Hailed as a writer of enormous range, huge ambition, stylistic daring, wide learning, audacious innovation and sardonic wit (The Washington Post), William T. Vollmann has established himself as one of the most prodigiously talented writers of our time. In this new work of fiction his first since the National Book Award winning novel Europe Central Vollmann offers a collection of what can be loosely described as ghost stories. They all deal with perennial Vollmann themes of love, death and the erotic, and there is a supernatural tinge to most of them. Organized by place Treiste, Sarajevo, Bohemia, Mexico, Norway, Japan, and America and spanning several centuries, these magnificent stories range in tone from melancholy to sly, and in style from the stripped down to the lush and lyrical.

Biografía del autor

William T. Vollmann nació en Los Ángeles en 1959. Cursó estudios universitarios en la Universidad de Cornell, donde se licenció summa cum laude en literatura comparada. Sus novelas incluyen You Bright and Risen Angels, Para Gloria (Muchnik Editores), Historias del mariposa (El Aleph), La familia real, Europa Central (Mondadori) y cinco entregas de una serie de siete novelas sobre la cuestión del enfrentamiento entre los indios nativos de América y los colonizadores y opresores europeos, publicadas bajo el título genérico Seven Dreams. Vollmann es también autor de los libros de relatos Historias del arcoíris, Trece relatos y trece epitafios (El Aleph) y El Atlas. Ha escrito, además, numerosos ensayos, de los que el único traducido al español es Los pobres (Debate). Su obra ha generado numerosos ensayos críticos a la par que ha recibido varios premios literarios importantes, como el National Book Award y el PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction.