news of Vollman's new book

[pynchonoid]

PW NewsLine for June 12, 2003
http://www.publishersweekly.com

[...] 

Eyebending Work of Staggering Length: McSweeney's Opus
Won't Fit on a Spine

Dave Eggers may be known for his pithy ironies, but
the latest project
from McSweeney's Books - about a year behind, and two
volumes larger
than, an earlier plan - might make you yearn for some
old-fashioned
minimalism.

The book, William Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising
Down, is the
novelist/journalist's 17-year inquiry into violence
that extends "a
gravely urgent invitation to look back at the world's
long bloody path
and find some threads of guidance with which we can
plot a moral
course." It clocks in at seven volumes and 3000 words
(it was
originally 4000), about  300 pages longer than all
five books in the
Harry Potter series combined.

In a letter to the media, the publisher says that
Vollmann's book
offers a very extensive analysis/narrative of people
ranging from
"John Brown to Josef Stalin, Abraham Lincoln to Bernie
Goetz"  and
comes compete with portraits, maps, case studies -
pretty much
everything but DE's shopping list. A 900-page abridged
version (use of
ironic air-quotes justified, um, suggested ) will come
out next year
from Ecco.

As the treatise is readied for a fall publication,
it's worth recalling
its complicated backstory. A number of editors at
larger houses had
contemplated it but had to give it up, with Paul
Slovak doing a long dance
before deciding he couldn't bring out the book
profitably. "It took a
Dave Eggers to jump into these waters," says Vollmann
agent Susan Golomb.
The book has the strange power to literally multiply
before your eyes - while
the letter from the company received this week
mentions five volumes, Golomb
says that it is now seven. In fact, the book is so big
that McSweeney's isn't
issuing galleys, instead soliciting reviewer's help in
how best to
deliver it, with CD-ROM the "default" option. Though
we're tempted to,
we won't ask how many pages the book could have saved
if they started
it on the cover....--Steven Zeitchik [...] 



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