Word on two upcoming American Epics:

We finally have a trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, his adaptation of Vineland.

If you count The Master as a riff on V., his new film will mean Anderson is almost halfway through adapting Pynchon’s bibliography for the screen. Early reports put the runtime somewhere between two-and-a-half to three hours though test screenings report it’s been cut down closer to two. The film’s budget has been hotly debated online: the largest Anderson has ever been allowed by a wide margin, the question usually comes down to whether or not DiCaprio is enough of a box office draw to lure a mainstream audience into a comedy about jaded leftists doing battle in the streets against a fascist police state. Obviously a film’s quality operates independently of its budget but in some adjacent, happier universe One Battle After Another makes billions enough to finance Anderson shooting an epic 30-hour Mason & Dixon or Against the Day.

And after the recent announcement of its imminent publication in a lavish four-volume set through Arcade Publishing — an imprint of “free speech” publisher Skyhorse, home of RFK Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci and The Wuhan Cover-Up, along with, uh, Woody Allen’s memoir… yeesh — The Metropolitan Review has run Alexander Sorondo’s dossier on William T. Vollmann’s A Table for Fortune, his 3,400+ page novel (even longer than Rising Up and Rising Down!) chronicling no less than “the last half-century of American war, life, and politics.” Of course, since another Pynchon novel appears a foregone conclusion, if anyone remains up to the task it’s Vollmann — Sorondo explicitly mentions his “reputation among some of the cooler literati as a kind of Gen-X Pynchon.” (Does that description maybe even work for PTA in a way?) We’ve previously seen excerpts run at Orion and Metro Silicon Valley, the latter of whom describes the work as “a novel about the black sheep of a famous political family who goes underground to escape his past.”

Vollmann’s novel won’t see release until 2026 and it’ll take me another year or ten to even get through it, but in the meantime my imagination is running wild faster than you could say “Harlot’s Ghost.”

Some gleanings from Sorondo’s article:

• “‘After seven hundred pages,’ Vollmann reflects in the Harper’s piece, ‘[the novel’s] protagonist remained unborn, and my editor found that tedious; on the phone he got sharp about it.’ He nodded along with their points. Heard them out. […] When he finished up and sent the new draft back to Viking, it was 400 pages longer.”
• Editor Dan Halpern: “He’s done things nobody else would do. I remember once he tried to get me to go out with him to ride the trains with the hobos. So I said, ‘It’s a felony if you get caught,’ not to mention the physical part of it.” Wimp!
• The descriptions of the modern publishing industry are nothing new, but that doesn’t make them any less depressing. “Viking, in their defense, might lean on the case that, if writing novels is an art, making books is a business.” T. C. Boyle: “[It’s] all very regrettable. I choose to remember the glory days, when it was very human.”
• Junot Díaz: “a writer of Vollmann’s astonishingly proteanic talents is always going to have trouble in the book business. Especially in the current iteration of the book business which with every passing year is more business and less books. […] That sucks for Vollmann, and for anyone who cares about literature.”
• Sorondo alludes to recent interviews in which Vollmann’s been asked what he has on deck. Still no word on that Melville-Lovecraft piece, but apparently he has another on Ayn Rand in the works. I can imagine his new publisher is stoked.
• Vollmann says “he can feel things ‘winding down.’ With corporate US publishing, for sure, and maybe his career overall.” Think there’s any chance we ever get all Seven Dreams?

And just while we’re talking trailers: we finally have one for Cronenberg’s The Shrouds. This is one of those Megalopolis situations where the fact it went without a distributor for so long after its festival run guarantees I will love it and I’ll do so alone. So hyped.

And we’re getting a new billy woods LP this year, “a haunting collection that weaves horror, humor, surrealism and Afropessimism into a cinematic tapestry, aided and abetted by a murderer’s row of producers,” according to the Backwoodz press release. “African zombies, time traveling trap cars, malevolent ragdolls and a dying Frantz Fanon are just a few of the revelers in woods’ danse macabre.” The credits sound insane: ELUCID, Cavalier, Bruiser Wolf, Despot, al.divino and Yolanda Watson on the mic and Alchemist, Kenny Segal, El-P, Conductor Williams, Preservation, Messiah Musik, Sadhugold, Ant, Shabaka Hutchings, Steel Tipped Dove, DJ Haram, Willie Green, Jeff Markey, Saint Abdullah and Human Error Club handling production. Maybe those fools who said a fascist takeover back in 2016 would usher in a new age of subversive art had a point… or maybe we just lose the Smithsonian and Kennedy Center. (Though fewer performances of Hamilton hardly feels like much of a loss. I’ll defer to Ishmael Reed on that one.)