Book overview
"[A] heroic, fascinating and important work."--Tom LeClair, The New York Times
A Table for Fortune has gone to press and will publish October 6, 2026.
In A Table for Fortune, National Book Award-winner William T. Vollmann depicts the last half-century of American politics, war, and life in this four-part, 3,000+ page novel that is at once a family drama, bildungsroman, and national epic.
Volumes 1 and 2 gather from the half-forgotten annals of the near-past--Stasi documents, Iraqi newspaper articles, presidential radio addresses--to form a vivid and mesmeric saga centered on Elliott Stevens, or DAVE, a CIA analyst whose glee at winning the Cold War is matched only by the dread that culminates in the nightmares of September eleventh and the resulting War on Terror. The hero of Volumes 3 and 4 is Matthew Stevens, Elliott's son, whose efforts to escape his parents and divine the fate of his life result in homelessness, addiction, and perhaps even happiness.
Spanning from 1968 to 2019, these volumes comb together--with Vollmann's generous wit and Olympian prose--a staggeringly well-researched, definitive history of American post-war foreign policy with a deft, moving chronicle of a family's descent into resentment and gloom. Elliott and Matthew Stevens are "passengers within a divine bullet," which, like Gogol's troika before it, overtakes all flying to its nation's end. This boxed set, with all four volumes in hardcover, allows the book to be read as intended: as one towering novel, the magnum opus of one of the giants of literature.
A Table for Fortune has gone to press and will publish October 6, 2026.
In A Table for Fortune, National Book Award-winner William T. Vollmann depicts the last half-century of American politics, war, and life in this four-part, 3,000+ page novel that is at once a family drama, bildungsroman, and national epic.
Volumes 1 and 2 gather from the half-forgotten annals of the near-past--Stasi documents, Iraqi newspaper articles, presidential radio addresses--to form a vivid and mesmeric saga centered on Elliott Stevens, or DAVE, a CIA analyst whose glee at winning the Cold War is matched only by the dread that culminates in the nightmares of September eleventh and the resulting War on Terror. The hero of Volumes 3 and 4 is Matthew Stevens, Elliott's son, whose efforts to escape his parents and divine the fate of his life result in homelessness, addiction, and perhaps even happiness.
Spanning from 1968 to 2019, these volumes comb together--with Vollmann's generous wit and Olympian prose--a staggeringly well-researched, definitive history of American post-war foreign policy with a deft, moving chronicle of a family's descent into resentment and gloom. Elliott and Matthew Stevens are "passengers within a divine bullet," which, like Gogol's troika before it, overtakes all flying to its nation's end. This boxed set, with all four volumes in hardcover, allows the book to be read as intended: as one towering novel, the magnum opus of one of the giants of literature.
