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Published Feb 2020
672 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
The National Book Award-winning author returns to his original fictional territory--the lives of the dispossessed in San Francisco--with a parable about the limitations of desire and life at the margins of society.
In such earlier works of fiction as The Rainbow Stories and The Royal Family, William T. Vollmann wrote of pimps, prostitutes, addicts and homeless dreamers in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. In this new novel, Vollmann returns there with a story that centers around a woman with magical powers whom everyone loves, and who has to love them all back.
After being initiated into a coven of island witches, Neva begins to fulfill her fate in a Tenderloin dive bar. Her worshippers include Richard, the introverted, alcoholic, occasionally omniscient narrator; a profane, aggressive transgender sex worker named Shantelle; the brisk but motherly barmaid Francine; and the former Frank, who has renamed herself after her idol Judy Garland. When Judy starts to love Neva too much, Judy's retired policeman boyfriend embarks on a mission of exposure and destruction.
Crafted out of language by turns spiritual and sexually graphic, The Lucky Star aches with compassion as it explores celebrity culture, gender identity, incest, Christian sacrifice and, most of all, the quotidian and sometimes faltering heroism of marginalized people who in the face of humiliation and outright violence seek to love in their own way, and stand up for who they are.
"[P]rovocatively playful...otherwise static plotlines are tightened by the interweaving of their common experiences. Vollmann's challenging novel is full of memorable moments." - Publishers Weekly
"Vollmann pours his signature fascination with outcasts, women's sexuality, violence, and injustice into this gargantuan, omnivorously explicit, ravening orgy of trauma and resilience. Rooted in interviews with women survivors, this is a molten amalgam of cynicism and compassion, horror and beauty." - Booklist
"Vollmann takes us back to the San Francisco of his early fiction, to the haunts of those who will live and die on the city's margins...For all the contemporaneity in the telling, there is (as always) a certain moral quality to Vollmann's work. In this one: there is no one on earth, no one, who would not benefit from a little more love and a lot less contempt." - The Millions, "Most Anticipated 2020"
"This big, underwater-lit novel returns Vollmann's work to the dive bars and gender-fluid clubs of San Francisco...Vollmann admirably captures the pull of vulnerability and invention, how sex can be, in the right space, a powerful way to know one's self, and ultimately, how much each of his characters here needs a space to be themselves." - Lit Hub, "Most Anticipated 2020"
This information about The Lucky Star was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
William T. Vollmann is the author of ten novels, including Whores for Gloria, The Royal Family, and 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 eight 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. He lives in California.
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