each of the Seven Dreams does a different little experiment with fiction. Argall is written in 17th-century English (Mason&Dixon does this in a more fun way IMO), The Ice Shirt mixes Saga-style storytelling in, The Dying Grass has two parallel strands of story separated on the page, I don’t know what fathers and crows does because my copy is shitty and print-to-order so the words are all smudged (an unfortunate issue with ordering any penguin book from Amazon now).

The Rifles has two parallel stories, separated by centuries, but the are interweaved at the word level, within sentences. It’s very hallucinatory and takes a while to click, but when it does it’s totally unique. Characters in the past will refer to present characters, and the present characters to those in the past, to the confusion of everyone around them. It rocks.

Also great is the story of Vollmann traveling solo to the far north, trying to camp out in extremely cold weather, and burning his eyebrows off. Reviews of REI equipment are included for the reader who wants to attempt the same (hint: it’s all shit, you should use a caribou hide, everything else fails in weather that cold).