I have an intense love for this man. It truly saddened me that I didn't have the opportunity to transcribe some of the amazing quotes and passages from this collection of short stories prior to my departure for Turkey.

Now, I am determined to go back and check it out once more. My hope is that the library has left at least a few of the tiny paper tabs that I used to mark the pages.

These tabs are like little signposts, guiding me to the most precious and memorable parts of the stories.

Each quote and passage holds a special meaning for me, and I long to have them written down so that I can revisit and cherish them whenever I want.

I can only imagine how wonderful it will be to discover those marked pages again and be reminded of the beauty and power of the words within.

8/10

I just can't be bothered to write an in-depth review here. However, on the whole, this is a great novel. I am very keen to read more of Vollmann's works. His writing style is unique and engaging, and he has a great ability to create vivid characters and interesting storylines. The novel I just read kept me on the edge of my seat from start to finish, and I found myself completely immersed in the world he had created. I would highly recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys reading great literature. Whether you are a fan of fiction or non-fiction, Vollmann's writing is sure to appeal to you. So, if you are looking for a great read, be sure to check out Vollmann's novels. You won't be disappointed!

"Great Fun"

Life is full of great fun if we know how to look for it. There are so many things that can bring us joy and excitement. For example, going on a picnic with family and friends, enjoying the beautiful scenery and delicious food. Or playing a sport that we love, feeling the rush of adrenaline and the sense of accomplishment when we score a goal or win a game.

We can also have great fun by exploring new places. Traveling to different countries and experiencing different cultures can be an eye-opening and unforgettable experience. Meeting new people, trying new foods, and learning new languages are all part of the adventure.

Another way to have great fun is by indulging in our hobbies. Whether it's painting, reading, writing, or cooking, doing something that we love can make us feel happy and fulfilled. Hobbies allow us to express ourselves and unleash our creativity.

In conclusion, great fun is all around us. We just need to be open to new experiences and willing to step out of our comfort zones. By doing so, we can create memories that will last a lifetime and enjoy a life filled with joy and excitement.

The Blue Yonder, in particular, was truly the highest of highlights. It was an experience that can only be described as fucking terrifying.

Standing there, looking out at the vast expanse of the Blue Yonder, my heart raced and my breath caught in my throat. The sheer magnitude and beauty of it all were overwhelming.

The colors were vivid and intense, as if nature had decided to put on a spectacular show just for me. But beneath the beauty, there was an underlying sense of danger and mystery.

I could feel the power of the Blue Yonder, and it made me realize just how small and insignificant I was in the grand scheme of things. It was a humbling and unforgettable experience that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

This was a rather challenging piece to rate. For me, it comes extremely close to a five-star rating. However, there are certain portions - "The Green Dress" and "Violet Hair" in particular - that can test the patience of even the most forgiving reader. These stories aren't precisely boring; rather, they are tedious and overly done in the peculiar style of postmodernism. But what the heck. Vollman, being part of the generation influenced by Barth, Barthelme, and Vonnegut, had some stylistic excesses that needed to be refined.

Yet, Vollman's more true-life stories? Goodness gracious. His strange combination of exuberance and exactitude is absolutely captivating. He confronts the grotesque with great fierceness but also with profound compassion. The gory details aren't presented merely for shock value. Instead, you sort of allow Vollman to hold your face forward, even as you might cringe. And while he won't spare you the worst, he'll endure it with you and do his utmost to extract something redeeming and even beautiful from the horror.

If you've never read Vollman before, "Rainbow Stories" is perhaps the best place to begin. Just be prepared.

I added \\n   You Bright and Risen Angels\\n to my read list a while ago. This was before Vollmann published his gutwrenching \\"Four Men\\" essay in Harper's and got interviewed by Trueanon, which both convinced me that he was probably the nicest, smartest, and most interesting living author. Outside of \\"Four Men\\", this is the first of Vollmann's writing I've read.

The stories in this collection are some of the best ever. All of them, to some extent, defy summary. Most actively skirt the line between fiction and nonfiction, either through Vollmann's extremely intrusive and conversational narration or because he inserts himself as a character. This leads to a couple of stories presenting as quasi-journalistic depictions of life in SF's Tenderloin neighborhood. In \\"The White Knights\\", Vollmann's self-insert spends time with the local skinheads, delving into their past lives and present troubles. \\"Ladies and Red Lights\\" does something similar with homeless sex workers. Calling either of these stories resounding, beautiful, brutal, hilarious, etc. would be a delirious understatement. The least apparently personal, but probably the most striking, however, is \\"The Indigo Engineers\\", where Vollmann spends time with the anarchic engineer Mark Pauline and his crew of bohemian junkyard warrior-inventors. It also has some succinct and fascinating meditations on the question of Nazis (WWII-era this time) \\"just following orders\\", believe it or not.

Less careful writers might use this kind of non-nonfiction trickery as a way to augment their creativity or authenticity. Seemingly sensing this, Vollmann detaches himself from the present-day, raiding alongside the Thuggee in 19th-century Pakistan throughout \\"The Yellow Sugar\\" and reanalyzing the tale of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in \\"Scintillant Orange\\". It's hard to call Vollmann's technique for blending present and past \\"anachronism\\"; it's something much more deceptive, snarky, and mystical. You may be lulled into a false sense of steadiness or realism by the first few stories, but once you've started \\"Scintillant Orange\\", you quickly become aware that some sort of thaumaturgical process is underway.

If any of these strike you as insincere or just too bizarre, \\"Yellow Rose\\", \\"The Blue Wallet\\", and \\"Violet Hair\\" are Vollmann's character studies, depicting his (?) struggles with understanding, giving, and receiving love. They're extremely heartfelt. You even feel some degree of embarrassment on his behalf. \\"Violet Hair\\", which casts Vollmann as the incarnation of the Holy Ghost attempting to seduce a Heideggerian grad student, is probably the most surreal, but it's still brutally honest, romantic, and somber. \\"The Green Dress\\" and \\"The Blue Yonder\\" (Vollmann's almost novella-length exploration of the mind of a serial killer preying on SF's homeless population) feel similar, but they're a bit detached. Regardless, his ability to portray shame, pleasure, horror, and agonized yearning feels completely unparalleled.

What is going on here? I don't really have much to say except that most of these stories are perfect, and the rest are extremely extremely good. Every single one seems to have something deeply and shamefully true to say about life and how we live it. At the end of \\"The Indigo Engineers\\", Vollmann writes:

I know that I am... plodding, sneaking, sneaking across my concrete days, while something big and bad comes after me. I know that I must admire myself and every[one else] or trying, however unsuccessfully, to sneak away. When I see an infant clutching for his shiny plastic toys, or sucking at the breast, I am sad, because I know that he will die, and the manipulations which he is learning can do no more than help him get through life. At these times I myself manipulate things to console myself. When I activate the squeaker, the baby becomes excited and kicks his fat feet and shakes his head and tries to suck at his shirt, looking at the Platonic Form of a Breast; watching him I am consoled by his involvement. This is the most important function of engineering.

The complete earnestness and clarity with which Vollmann conveys every idea, speculation, or vision renders any attempt to look away or reconsider or revisualize pretty much useless. I don't think a writer can aim for anything higher than that. What an incredible book.

Solid 3.5, but I'll round up since Scintillant Orange, Red Hands, and Ladies and Red Lights are some of the best stories I've read.

Overall though, I have mixed thoughts. It had an incredibly strong start with the first few sections, which really grabbed my attention. We were introduced to the lives of various oppressed classes in America, such as gangs, prostitutes, and refugees.

However, as the collection progressed, it seemed to veer off in a different direction. Some of those "other things" didn't quite work for me. For example, Yellow Sugar was just plain boring and overly long. On the other hand, stories like Yellow Rose, Green Dress, and Blue Wallet were okay, but not particularly interesting in my opinion.

Thankfully, Blue Yonder brought it back with a wonderful story about the homeless population in the area. But then it dropped back into the Indigo and Violet stories, which were just alright. I have to admit, I couldn't make heads or tails of the last one at all.

Luckily, the collection ended on a high note with a short and powerful piece on X-Rays. It was a very cool analogy for how the beauty of death is outside our visible spectrum, leaving us only to see the horror of it.

Overall, the balance of this collection was very strange and often a bit overwhelming. The goal was commendable, and in many cases, the author achieved it. I just had a hard time seeing the through line. Nevertheless, I'm excited to see how Vollmann evolves as a writer. It's clear that he had insane talent from the beginning, and this collection is much better than Bright and Risen Angels in my opinion.

One, perhaps two, interesting stories out of thirteen. Alas,

The Ice-Shirt by William T. Vollmann was also a laborious read. Maybe I should give up on attempting to discover more of the Vollmann genius or magic that had such a profound impact on me when I read the truly excellent, outstanding

The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War by William T. Vollmann this year. It seems that not all of his works can reach the same lofty heights. While The Dying Grass was a masterpiece that transported me into a different world and made me feel deeply for the characters and their struggles, The Ice-Shirt failed to capture my attention in the same way.

Perhaps it was the subject matter, or maybe it was the writing style that didn't quite click with me this time. But whatever the reason, I find myself a bit disappointed and wondering if I should continue my exploration of Vollmann's works or move on to other authors.

Vollmann writes with a passion that is palpable. He seems to be completely immersed in the act of writing, often getting carried away by his own words. His sentences build up an incredible amount of momentum, so much so that you hardly realize they have run on for pages. The metaphors he uses are rich and vivid, sometimes bordering on the comical in their overwrought nature. Overall, Rainbow Stories is a thoroughly entertaining read, although it does have its unbalanced moments.

The stories in the book span a wide range of genres, from stark realism to ridiculous fantasy. They are often at their best when they blend both elements, as in the "scintillant orange" chapter, which is by far my favorite. In this chapter, Babylon is sometimes conflated with the present day in interesting and humorous ways, such as when Vollmann refers to "Babylon's Joint Chiefs of Staff." On the other hand, the "white" chapter is a simple and straightforward portrait of San Francisco skinheads, but it is still very compelling.

However, not all of the chapters are equally successful. The "blue" chapter drags on for far too long without a clear purpose, and a few other chapters wear out their welcome. Despite these flaws, I really enjoyed Vollmann's raw enthusiasm and the vivid描绘 of the San Francisco scenery. Overall, Rainbow Stories is a wonderful book to read.

The Rainbow Stories is a remarkable collection that brings together a diverse range of characters from different walks of life. It includes our society's outcasts such as tramps, the homeless, drunks, prostitutes, and skinheads. It also features residents of morgues, terrorists, lab technicians, immigrants, and even Hebrews in fiery furnaces. The author, Vollmann, writes in a style influenced by the surrealists and the saga literature of the Scandinavians. His sentences are large and imaginative, filled with metaphors that展现了他精确、俏皮、专注和广阔的思维。 The stories in The Rainbow Stories are not traditional short stories in the Poe sense but rather a collection of related thematic and experiential material. Each story offers a unique portrait of its characters, with no hidden interiority to be mined. Vollmann's commitment to recording and rendering characters as they are adds to the authenticity of the collection. However, for contemporary readers accustomed to more intrusive narration, the effect can be alienating. The collection includes stories such as The White Knights, which is a portrait of San Francisco skinheads, and Red Hands, where an IRA bomber meets a lab technician killing mice. There are also stories like Ladies and Red Lights, a portrait of Vollmann's Tenderloin, and Scintillant Orange, which offers a new take on the story of the three Hebrew boys. Overall, The Rainbow Stories is a thought-provoking and engaging collection that challenges readers to exercise their empathy and look beyond the surface of its characters.

This was the most stupefyingly brilliant kick in the head.

The kind of volt and jolt which leaves a concrete and metallic aftertaste.

Lazy pseudo-book-jacket-writer-mathematician-me says 'Bukowski + Foster Wallace ÷ Garcia Marquez x Pynchon = William T. Vollmann'.

I've discovered my new favourite place to hang out.

It's the world as scribed by this compulsive, obsessive and distinctive writer.

Headbendingly good - I was seeing colours.

The Rainbow Stories are so much more than a collection of short stories.

There's pulse and heart to these pieces which connects them more than just thematically.

They're like alternate realities of each other.

There's urban folklore, interviews with LA prostitutes, skinheads and street urchins; there are inner monologues and fantastical, tripped out moments; there is mythical imagery and dusty dessert stories of vagabonds and thugs.

So many voices; so much chatter and noise blended together.

I perceive WTV's writing to be as brutally real, as psychologically intoxicating and as compelling as my beloved David Foster Wallace's stuff.

Each individual story is written in its own unique style, but there are controlled, episodic and almost cinematic structures here.

Must have a great editor too.

The use of brief footnotes —did DFW find inspiration here?— asides and succinct moments to punctuate the longer passages is flat-out genius.

I want to write like WTV.

William T. Vollmann's work is truly a literary wonder.

The way he weaves together such diverse elements and voices creates a rich and immersive tapestry.

His ability to capture the essence of different characters and settings is remarkable.

It's as if he is able to step into their shoes and tell their stories with authenticity and passion.

The Rainbow Stories are a testament to his talent and creativity.

They are not just stories, but a reflection of the human condition in all its complexity and beauty.

I can't wait to explore more of his work and see where it takes me.

Making love to yourself," sighed sheet-rock Jake over his seventeenth can of Black label. "It's like finding a constant in a world full of uncertainties. It's making love to the one person who's never going to betray you or leave you.

You see, in this vast and often unforgiving world, we search for that sense of security and stability. We look for someone to share our lives with, to hold us when we're down, and to celebrate with us when we're up. But sometimes, those people let us down. They betray our trust or simply walk away.

According to Moritz, the number of hours elapsed since death can be computed by subtracting the rectal temperature from 98.6 F and dividing the result by 1.5. It's a strange and somewhat macabre formula, but it gives us a way to measure something that is otherwise impossible to know.

In a way, it's like trying to find order in chaos. Just as we try to understand the mysteries of death, we also try to make sense of our own lives. We look for meaning and purpose, and sometimes, we find it in the most unexpected places.