Sale!

Imperial

Amazon.com Price:  $32.00 (as of 02/05/2019 02:36 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

From the writer of Europe Central, winner of the National Book Award, a journalistic tour de force along the Mexican-American border – a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

Watch for Vollmann’s new work of nonfiction, No Immediate Danger, coming in April of 2018

For generations of migrant workers, Imperial Country has held the promise of paradise and the reality of hell. It sprawls across a stirring accidental sea, across the deserts, date groves and labor camps of Southeastern California, right across the border into Mexico. In this eye-opening book, William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, exploring polluted rivers and guarded factories and talking with everyone from Mexican migrant workers to border patrolmen. Teeming with patterns, facts, stories, people and hope, that is an epic study of an emblematic region.
Amazon Best of the Month, August 2009: How do you describe a 1,300-page book in 150 words? Start with adjectives (some of them opposites): vast, intrepid, passionate, and yes, from time to time dull, illuminating and infuriating, satirical and confessional, exhausting and exhaustive, dirty, fertile, and dry. William T. Vollmann, legendary for his huge, all-consuming books of fiction, history, and reporting, has spent much of the past ten years returning obsessively to one of the most harshest but most contested territories in North The us, the desert borderlands of southeastern California and northern Mexico he calls Imperial. Wading through water-use arcana, agri-booster archives, and centuries of colonial history; taking note of lettuce farmers, motel clerks, and dance-hall hostesses; and crossing the border hundreds of times (at the same time as meeting those who cross by the use of other means, and those that try to stop them), Vollmann has written an intensely personal fever dream of an encyclopedia that makes a peculiar, northern companion to last year’s giant borderlands masterpiece, Roberto Bolano’s 2666. –Tom Nissley

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » Immigrants » Imperial

Recent Products