The Atlas (novel)

infobox Book |
name = The Atlas
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = 1997 Penguin Books edition
author = William T. Vollmann
cover_artist = Ken Miller
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Travelogue, memoir
publisher = Viking Penguin
release_date = 1996
media_type = Print (Paperback)
pages =
isbn = ISBN 0-14-025449-8 (paperback)
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"The Atlas" is a 1996 semi-autobiographical work by American novelist William T. Vollmann.

A mixture of fiction and nonfiction, this book was drawn from Vollmann's experiences traveling around the world. He relates these experiences through 53 interconnected stories that weave their way through the novel.

Vollmann has stated that Yasunari Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories were an important influence on the structure of the collection. Several of the short stories share the same titles as some of Vollmann's earlier novels, such as "Fathers and Crows", "Butterfly Stories" and "The Rifles"; he describes these as miniature versions of the larger works.

The stories in the first half of the book are numbered from one to 26 until the central story, also called "The Atlas." In the second half, the stories are numbered in reverse from 26 to one. The pairs of stories created by this system often comment on each other in a variety of ways. In addition to the table of contents, the stories are also listed according to the longitude and latitude of their setting.

When Vollmann went on a literary reading tour following the publication of "The Atlas", he gained some notoriety for firing a gun loaded with blanks during his reading of the first story in the collection "The Back of My Head," which is based an experience Vollmann had in former Yugoslavia during wartime. [http://www.thefanzine.com/sections.php?s=features&id=66&a=articles&p=2]