||“Just please don’t make me sound angry,” he said. “I’m not angry.”

William T. Vollmann spent “twelve or fifteen years” researching and writing a novel about the CIA calledA Table for Fortune; as of this writing it has a few back-channel blurbs from editors and assistants who’ve caught glimpses and say it might be his masterpiece, or at the very least a new sort of achievement for him. But when he finished it, in 2022, he turned it over to his publisher, the final installment of a multi-book contract (although even that part gets complicated), and that’s when, to use Vollmann’s words, “Viking fired me.” fromThe Last Contract[The Metropolitan Review][more inside]posted bychavenetat 12:32 AM -20 comments