Here is an excerpt from Kate’s recent review of William T. Vollmann’s new story collection Last Stories and Other Stories, which she was delighted to be asked to write for The New York Times:
“In a recent Vanity Fair article, the critic James Wood was quoted as saying, “You can be a good storyteller . . . and still not be a serious storyteller.” He went on to claim that a novel “is not a serious one” when “it tells a fantastical, even ridiculous tale, based on absurd and improbable premises.” Taken to its necessary and logical conclusion, this statement excludes an entire line of “serious” works by writers like William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Angela Carter, Gabriel García Márquez and so many others — including, yes, William T. Vollmann. Really? Speaking of survivors, and despite such gratuitous attacks, fabulism remains a most vital form.”