William T. Vollmann is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories, and a seven-volume critique of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down. In 2007 he also published Poor People, a world-wide examination of poverty through the eyes of the impoverished themselves, and in 2008 an examination of the trainhopping hobo lifestyle, Riding Toward Everywhere. His novel Europe Central won the National Book Award in 2005. He has also won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, and a Whiting Writers' Award. His journalism and fiction have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Spin, and Granta. Vollmann lives in Sacramento.

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courtesy William T. Vollmann