Whores for Gloria

From the pen of the ‘ferociously talented’ author of The Rainbow Stories and The Ice Shirt comes a gritty realistic but compassionate story set in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. It celebrates the experience of being human in a deprived or outcast class as we follow the plight of Jimmy and his life in the darkest nether world of pimps and prostitutes, hustlers and conmen. He is a compulsive visitor of whorehouses, where he pays whores for their stories, their memories, moments of happiness, glimpses of hope, fragments of warmth and tenderness. These become his story, his life, his personality as he rebuilds them into a vision of humanity, the beauty and dignity of existence intact.

His wild invention and pyrotechnic imagination are reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon, while his bathos and high comedy recall early William Burroughs. However, Vollmann is a complete original, a compelling fantasist of the streets, a chronicler of the subterranean world where few venture and even fewer return to tell their tale with such eloquence and wit.