Publication Order of Seven Dreams Books
| The Ice-Shirt | 1990 |
| Fathers and Crows | 1992 |
| The Rifles | 1994 |
| Argall | 2001 |
| The Dying Grass | 2015 |
Publication Order of Carbon Ideologies Books
| No Immediate Danger | 2018 |
| No Good Alternative | 2018 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| You Bright and Risen Angels | 1987 |
| Whores for Gloria | 1992 |
| The Atlas | 1996 |
| The Royal Family | 2000 |
| Europe Central | 2005 |
| The Lucky Star | 2020 |
| A Table for Fortune | 2026 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| The Rainbow Stories | 1989 |
| Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs | 1991 |
| Butterfly Stories | 1993 |
| Last Stories and Other Stories | 2014 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| An Afghanistan Picture Show | 1992 |
| Rising Up and Rising Down | 2003 |
| Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres | 2006 |
| Poor People | 2007 |
| Riding Toward Everywhere | 2008 |
| Imperial | 2009 |
| Kissing the Mask | 2010 |
| Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip Through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan | 2011 |
| The Book of Dolores | 2013 |
About William T. Vollmann
William T. Vollmann (born 28 July 1959 in Los Angeles) is an American novelist, journalist, war correspondent, short story writer and essayist. He won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction for “Europe Central” and is the author of “Seven Dreams”, a cycle of novels about the settlement of North America.
Vollmann attended high school in Bloomington, Indiana, where his father was a business professor at Indiana University. He studied at Deep Springs College and took a degree in comparative literature at Cornell University, then left a doctoral programme at the University of California, Berkeley after a year. In 1982, having saved money from odd jobs, he travelled to Afghanistan and joined a group of mujahideen heading for the front lines of the war against the Soviet Union. The trip became his first non-fiction book, “An Afghanistan Picture Show”, which was not published until 1992.
Back in the United States he worked as a computer programmer and wrote much of his first novel, “You Bright and Risen Angels” (1987), after hours on office computers. He received a Whiting Award in 1988. “The Ice-Shirt” (1990) opened “Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes”, planned as seven novels; five have appeared, the most recent being “The Dying Grass” (2015). His other fiction often concerns people, frequently prostitutes, on the margins of war and poverty.
“Europe Central” follows a wide range of characters, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich among them, caught up in the fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union. His non-fiction is often as long as his novels. “Rising Up and Rising Down” (2003) is a seven-volume, 3,300-page study of violence that drew on more than 20 years of work and on his reporting from Cambodia, Somalia and Iraq; it was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. “Imperial” (2009) is an account of life in Imperial County, California, on the Mexican border, and “Carbon Ideologies” appeared in two volumes in 2018.
Vollmann lives in Sacramento, California. A 2013 essay in Harper’s described how the FBI had investigated him as a suspect in the Unabomber case in the 1990s. His novel “The Lucky Star” was published in 2020, and Arcade Publishing lists “A Table for Fortune”, a four-part novel about American politics, war and family life between 1968 and 2019, for release as a boxed set on 20 October 2026.