If, following David Foster Wallace's untimely death in 2008, William T. Vollmann had accepted the Roy Edward Disney Professorship in Creative Writing at Pomona College – if he had become part of the MFA machine, that is to say – one wonders whether the landscape of criticism on the contemporary might look different than it does today. He declined the honour (which went instead to Jonathan Lethem), and Vollmann's prodigious and singularly strange body of work remains one of the more surprisingly understudied in contemporary fiction. Christopher Coffman and Daniel Lukes's new collection of essays William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion is long overdue.

This collection will be undeniably important not just for students of Vollmann but also for the field of contemporary literature more broadly. Coffman and Lukes bring together twelve critical essays, along with eleven shorter pieces by Vollmann's “peers, confidantes, and collaborators” (back matter). In his introduction, Coffman frames the collection in terms of Leslie Marmon Silko's critique of postmodern disengagement with historical suffering, arguing that Vollmann's work – often grounded in “participative research” (to borrow Georg Bauer's phrase) – bridges the gap between postmodern metafiction's alleged narcissism and an ethically committed historicism (2, 73). Vollmann contributes to contemporary literature an aesthetic and ethical alternative to the “post-postmodern” literatures of his peers – to the psychological realism of Jonathan Franzen, for example, as well as to the “new sincerity” of David Foster Wallace. Building inductively an ethics of openness and empathy, Vollmann demands that his readers remain vulnerable to the “essential foreignness of others” (14).

Thus many of the essays collected in this volume grapple with the moral quandaries of Vollmann's immersive ethnographic methods and his often uncomfortable historical subject matter, seeking to unpack the ethical imperatives underlying the writer's expansive vision. Bryan Santin argues, for example, that Vollmann's empathic “Moral Calculus” in Rising Up and Rising Down (2003) must be “understood through the aesthetic prism and imaginative historical leaps of his fiction,” a fiction which demands that we, in Vollmann's words, “put ourselves into the circumstances described” (143, italics in original). Okla Elliott situates Vollmann's ethical project within the “new universalisms” that arose in the wake of the Cold War and through the millennial turn, arguing that his philosophical contribution should be read as an escape from the false dilemma of humanist essentialism versus relativistic particularity. Buell Wisner convincingly argues that Vollmann's specificity of reference in concert with his autobiographical engagement moves contemporary historicism beyond the “bankruptcy of … historicity under postmodernism” (101). And Miles Liebtag, Joshua Jensen, and Daniel Lukes explore the complicated power dynamics of Vollmann's work, each asking in his way how Vollmann's “deep textual investment in the plight of disempowered minorities,” as Liebtag puts it (195), relates to postcolonial discourse, to analyses of bureaucratic and state apparatuses, and to theories of gender and sexuality. Françoise Palleau-Papin and Michael K. Walonen compellingly describe how photography and spatial representation contribute to, and indeed broaden, Vollmann's ethico-literary project.

But the volume does not only provide readers with a set of philosophical, theoretical, and critical coordinates by which to navigate Vollmann's daunting and beautifully manifold oeuvre. Aaron Chandler and John Cox give wonderfully engaged readings of Vollmann's textual interlocutors – focussing especially on James Agee, Walker Evans, and Danilo Kiš. Geoffrey Smith discusses the details of Vollmann's archive at the Ohio State University Library in a thoughtfully informative piece that will guide researchers for years to come. And the wealth of reflective material on Vollmann's personality, his writing habits, his visual art, his typographical design specifications, his paratexts, and, perhaps most tellingly, his impact on individual readers will prove immeasurably valuable to critics looking to better situate the author in his own historical context. Carla Bolte, for example, and Mary Austin Speaker write of designing the body text for Vollmann's trade volumes, Priscilla Juvelis of marketing Vollmann's artist's books, Mariya Gusev of translating for Vollmann in Russia, journalist and travel editor Heather Corcoran about reading Vollmann's travel writing, and former sex worker Melissa Petro on reading Vollmann's sex-trafficking stories.

Vollmann pushes the boundaries of his readers’ comforts and familiarities, and we see in this volume ample engagement with many of the challenges posed by the author to his readers, both explicit and unconscious. By situating Vollmann not only in the context of his literary forerunners and peers – Agee and Walker, Barth, Borges, Burroughs, Danielewski, Franzen, Kiš, Mailer, Pynchon, Wallace – but also in the context of his more immediate social and professional milieu, the editors begin to map a critical terrain appropriate to the complexities of Vollmann's work.