SOURCE: An interview in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 13, No. 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 9-24.

McCaffery is an American editor, essayist, and nonfiction writer who has done extensive research into modern and postmodern literature. In the following interview, Vollmann discusses his career, authors and works that have influenced him, and his main literary preoccupations.

[McCaffery]: In one of your biographical statements, you emphasize your absorption as a kid in books—this sense of riding on the magic carpet with the caliph, and so on. Did inhabiting these exotic places so long and so deeply in your imagination have anything to do with wanting to actually visit them now that you're grown up?

[Vollmann]: My primary world is just this one basic "dream world" that I've been in from the time I was a kid. All these worlds that I see and write about are equally real and can coexist...