The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann's Battle to Publish an Epic (2025)

His essay in Harper's mentioned in the article:

https://archive.ph/2026.03.21-191750/https://harpers.org/arc...

Wow Bill on the front page! For what it’s worth, he’s the only author who has written me back after I sent him a note through USPS. He’s a fascinating, charitable thinker with a multifaceted oeuvre and this text will be a profound addition to it.

This article was so exciting to read I stopped in the middle to Google if it was available. It is not... yet. But the release date is this June. https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/arcade-publishing/9781648...

Vollmann seems amazingly prolific, 'writing by the yard' as one of the editors put it. I've ordered the first volume of The Carbon Ideologies to see what the sentences and paragraphs are like, how it sounds.

PS: Is it really that expensive to licence specific fonts at book publisher scale?

Based on the title, I thought this was going to be about a problem with JIRA or something, battling to get his Epic published by the end of the business day ... xD

(this is probably not my kind of submission xD )

I read his Europe Central last year. It was a challenging read, but I came out of it knowing more about Shostakovich’s (alleged) sex life. And other neat WWII stuff, too.

I haven't read any of his other stuff but I'm very interested in this subject in particular so I'm going pick this up as soon as it is available

Sounds incredible. Like a lot of his stuff. Also sounds incredibly intimidating.

I didn't know most of this, but eagerly await my pre-order!