911
911 Novel
A Table For Fortune
A01=William T. Vollmann
American foreign policy
Angola novel
Author_William T. Vollmann
Big Novel
Category=FBA
Category=FV
Category=FXF
CIA novel
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_historical-fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
forthcoming
Fortune novel
four volume novel
Historical Novel
History of Gulf war
history of the CIA novel
Iraq novel
Iraq war
long novel
longest book
longest novel ever
luddite novel
maximalist
Novel
terrorism novel
unabomber
Vollmann
William T. Vollmann
WTV
Product details
- ISBN 9781648211881
- Weight: 3522g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 08 Oct 2026
- Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In A Table for Fortune, National Book Award-winner William T. Vollmann depicts from the balcony-level of history the last half-century of American politics, war, and life. At once a family drama, bildungsroman, and national epic, this 3,000+ page, four-part novel may be our most ambitious writer's most ambitious work.
Parts 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 epic 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 Parts 3 and 4 is Matthew Stevens, Elliott's son, whose efforts to divine the fate of his life and escape his parents result in homelessness, addiction, and perhaps even happiness.
Spanning from 1968 to 2019, these volumes comb together –– with Vollmann's trademark 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. Not since War and Peace have the internal lives of characters and the history of a nation been forged together in so forceful a study of causes, fate, and nationhood.
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.
Parts 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 epic 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 Parts 3 and 4 is Matthew Stevens, Elliott's son, whose efforts to divine the fate of his life and escape his parents result in homelessness, addiction, and perhaps even happiness.
Spanning from 1968 to 2019, these volumes comb together –– with Vollmann's trademark 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. Not since War and Peace have the internal lives of characters and the history of a nation been forged together in so forceful a study of causes, fate, and nationhood.
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.
William T. Vollmann is the author of twelve novels, including Europe Central, which won the National Book Award. He has also written four collections of stories, including The Rainbow Stories and The Atlas, which won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a memoir, and ten works of nonfiction, including Rising Up and Rising Down and Imperial, both of which were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harpers, Esquire, Granta, and many other publications. He lives in Sacramento, California.
