William T. Vollmann, the author famous for a 3,300-page, seven-volume exploration of violence, has turned to the shortest form of book available to writers–the Kindle Single. The eBook sells for $2.99, a bargain compared to the Kindle edition of Vollmann’s Imperial, which retails for $24.99.
Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip Through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan marks the award-winning journalist’s first foray into the world of short eBooks. It is published by Byliner (the new nonfiction press that gave away more than 50,000 copies of Jon Krakauer‘s scathing expose about the work of Greg Mortenson).
Here’s more about Vollmann’s new Kindle Single: “Just weeks after multiple disasters struck Japan, National Book Award winner William T. Vollmann ventures into the nuclear hot zone, outfitted only with rubber kitchen gloves, a cloth facemask, and a capricious radiation detector. He emerges with a haunting report on daily life in a now-ravaged Japan — a country he has known and loved for many years. And in the cities and towns hit hardest by the earthquake, tsunami, and radioactive contamination, Vollmann finds troubling omens of a future heading toward us all.” (Via Publishers Lunch)