A Table for Fortune: Box Set - by William T Vollmann (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"[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.

Review Quotes

Praise for William T. Vollmann

"A Table for Fortune exemplifies a genre of books I call monsterpieces, culture-mastering excessive novels that deform conventional narratives into ingenious and instructive monstrosities. . . . Some of the book's features resemble those of other hefty and heroically chancy American novels--the documentary experiments of John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, the fragmentary logorrhea of William Gaddis' JR, the paranoia in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the hyper-patriotic voice of Uncle Sam in Robert Coover's The Public Burning, the descriptions of tedious government bureaucracy in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King. . . . [A] heroic, fascinating and important work."--Tom LeClair, The New York Times

"A work like this is not only a book about powerful conspirators. It is also a book that can help keep people afloat as they navigate the tumultuous seas of the post-truth era, dodge the whirlpools of digital banality and resist the leviathans of techno-capitalism. . . [A Table for Fortune] crowns a career that reminds readers that the world's troubles must be apprehended as much more complex than a few data points and alarmist sound bites suggest."--Christopher Coffman, The Conversation

"Hugely ambitious and with rewards for those with ample time to spare."--Kirkus

"Vollmann's long-standing sympathy for society's untouchables brings out his best writing, propelling the reader through a kaleidoscope of precisely observed landscapes and painfully plausible characters."--Publishers Weekly

"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

About the Author

William T. Vollmann is the author of twelve novels, including Europe Central, which won the National Book Award. He has also written four collections of stories, including The Rainbow Stories and The Atlas, which won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a memoir, and ten works of nonfiction, including Rising Up and Rising Down and Imperial, 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 The New Yorker, Harpers, Esquire, Granta, and many other publications. He lives in Sacramento, California.