SOURCE: A review of Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs, in The New York Times Book Review, May 23, 1993, p. 10.

In the following review of Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs, Bush, a novelist, discusses the uneven quality of Vollmann's literary technique.

William T. Vollmann's new collection, Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs, can be read as a feverish contemporary travelogue—and as a tour of Mr. Vollmann's brain. It's a frontline bulletin from the world of those whom the writer Pico Iyer has called "the Transit Loungers," the new rootless wanderers who speed through cities and continents as if through revolving doors, torn between global familiarity and the loss of home.

In his last few prolific years, Mr. Vollmann, who is just 33, has produced a substantial body of work, juggling reportage with fictionalized plunges into urban subcultures (The Rainbow Stories and Whores for Gloria) and the quasi-historical novels (The Ice-Shirt and...