for Kindle series. "Apocrypha" was awarded the 2015 Short Story Dagger by Great Britain's Crime Writers' Association. He is the author of the collections Dead Boys and Sweet Nothing and the novels This Wicked World, Angel Baby, which won the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers, The Smack, and Rovers. He received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow.
Lange's latest novel is Joe Hustle.
Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Lange's reply:
I read a number of books at once, consigning each to a certain time of day. One in current rotation is The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann. Vollmann is my favorite living author and has been for years. I’m awestruck by his formal experimentation, his historical research, and the emotional wallop his books pack. That he has not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize is a straight up crime. The Dying Grass is the fifth book in his Seven Dreams series (only six have beenVisit Richard Lange's website.published so far), which examines the history of confrontation between Native Americans and various colonizers. Don’t think James Michener though. Vollmann turns historical fiction on its head. These books are spells, hallucinations, and visions that take you places you’ve never been and teach you things you should have been taught in school. History has never been more real and surreal (and thus more accurate) than in these novels. The Dying Grass is set during the Nez Perce War of 1877, when the tribe finally had enough of being cheated and brutalized by the U.S. government and greedy settlers and struck back. It, like all of the books in the series, is a marvel, and you will come away changed by the experience of reading it.
Vollmann doesn’t only write history, though. My introduction to him came through Whores for Gloria, a weird, gritty, heartbreaking wallow among the drunks, hookers, and other lost souls inhabiting San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. It blew me away, made me a lifelong fan, and is a good entry point into the man’s oeuvre if you’re reluctant to commit right off the bat to 500 pages on the Norse exploration of the New World (The Ice Shirt).
The Page 69 Test: This Wicked World.
The Page 69 Test: Angel Baby.
The Page 69 Test: The Smack.
The Page 69 Test: Rovers.
Q&A with Richard Lange.
--Marshal Zeringue