William Vollmann has written many, many books, with most of them clocking in at around 1,000 pages. He recently won the National Book Critics Award for Europe Central, a series of linked short stories dealing with the World War II conflict between Germany and Russia. His 3,500+ page epic examination of the history and motives of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down, was published unabridged by McSweeney’s in 2003. His signature topics include crack, prostitution and the European conquest/slaughter of North America, as well as his own feats of journalistic derring-do in the world’s most heinous war zones. Vollmann has lived briefly at the magnetic north pole, interviewed opium warlords in southeast Asia and spent time with white supremacists and militant animal rights activists. His most recent book, Uncentering the Earth, examines the social impact following Copernicus’ discovery that the earth was not the center of the universe. It is a story of the complexities and imperfections of the natural world butting heads with the elegance of ideology. I spoke with him over the telephone from his home in suburban Sacramento.

Q: After completing Rising Up and Rising Down, I’ve heard you say that your research into violence––which you had thought of as your life’s work––was coming to an end and that you wanted to move on to other projects. Is that how you’re feeling still and how are those other projects coming?

V: Hold on one second, Ben. My little girl is here and she is playing with all my old boy scout mess kits. I’m just telling her that it’s okay for her to use them as a drum. I will vacate the room. [laughs] Hey Lisa, spread out that stuff and you can bang as much as you want. I’m going to talk to Ben downstairs.

Anyway, when I think of the things I’m working on now, I’m interested in other aspects of human experience as well. This book I’m writing about Noh theater is a very, very happy book even though many of the plays are tragedies, but it’s focusing on what makes art beautiful and how to best represent feminine beauty. So, that’s something I really enjoy. And then my book about the California-Mexico border, of course, it has some sad moments and so forth but really it’s just very relaxing and tranquility inducing for me to be studying the price of green beans over a hundred year period. It’s a lot of fun to think about and to see parables about America and the way that agriculture has altered and changed over the last century.

For instance, the ideal in Imperial County used to be the small family farm and then pretty soon the homestead itself wasn’t sufficient. People wanted things like washing machines, so they had to raise extra crops and sell them to get the cash to have these conveniences. And now raising the crops and so forth is basically for money and so it’s these huge agrobusinesses involved and the end result is that the land is so fertile and the technology has gotten so successful that there are constant crises of overproduction. During the depression they were taking truckloads of stuff from the Imperial Valley and dumping it in the ocean while people were starving.