A Calculus of Violence: “…(O)ver the last decade and a half, Mr. Vollmann, 44, has pumped out thousands of pages of dark, difficult, scatological prose rife with all manner of violence and degradation. Thanks to books like Whores for Gloria, The Rainbow Stories and nearly a dozen other titles, he has earned a cult following and comparisons to both Thomas Pynchon and Céline.

His fascination with prostitutes, pimps, drug addicts and skinheads is legendary. As are his research methods. His quest for authenticity has led him to prowl war zones and bad neighborhoods, to sleep with streetwalkers, to smoke crack with junkies and to endure grueling physical ordeals. …(H)is enthusiasm for guns, it turns out, owes more to moral conviction than literary curiosity. It is a direct result, Mr. Vollmann says, of the research he undertook for his latest work: Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,000-page meditation on the ethics of violence.

The book, which will be published in seven volumes by McSweeney’s in October (and in abridged form by Ecco next year), took him 23 years to write. A dense, meandering, amalgam of historical analysis, contemporary case studies, anecdotes, essays, theory, charts, graphs, photographs and drawings, it is Mr. Vollmann’s attempt to bring definitive resolution to a conundrum that has preoccupied generations of thinkers: under what conditions can violence be justified?

As he writes on page 291, when he finally gets around to explaining his intentions: ‘My own aim in beginning this book was to create a simple and practical moral calculus which would make it clear when it was acceptable to kill, how many could be killed and so forth.'” NY Times