This month we’re celebrating William T. Vollmann, one of our greatest American writers. Bill’s prodigious catalog includes novels, story collections, a memoir, non-fiction books, including the multi-volume Rising Up and Rising Down and Carbon Ideologies, and numerous pieces of journalism. His novel, the four-volume A Table for Fortune will be published in March 2026. And it could very well be his masterpiece.
Bill has terminal cancer, and was told he has anywhere from several months to several years to live. While hoping Bill defies the medical odds, it got me looking back at our get-togethers and the interviews we’ve had over the past 10 years. On our last show, we re-aired my April 2020 interview with Bill for his novel The Lucky Star. On today’s show, we’ll be hearing my first interview with him, for his collection Last Stories and Other Stories, which initially aired August 7th, 2014 on KBOO’s Between the Covers. The book, and much of our conversation, centers on death, which seems sadly appropriate. In our conversation, Bill said: “To write about death is to admit failure because we can’t actually imagine what it would be like to be dead.” But in this collection of stories, Bill gives it his best shot.