William T. Vollmann is one of the great oddities of contemporary American letters. His output is voluminous and often widely praised—yet he’s not read very often. His novels tend to be big, difficult, postmodern doorstops in the vein of similar works by Thomas Pynchon, William Gass, David Foster Wallace. In his nonfiction, he’s a sort of gonzo journalist, a politically conscious Hunter S. Thompson whose interests—war, political power, the lives and struggles of those living at the margins of society—inform his life as well. In the pursuit of his obsessions, he’s consorted with prostitutes, drug addicts, vagrants, transvestites, refugees, and illegal immigrants. His name is on the short list of writers who might bring the Nobel back to America.

Yet most well-read people could be forgiven for never having heard of him. Myself, I’m fascinated by the man, his bizarre lifestyle, his politics, his writing, his works. Yet aside from a few excerpts in an unsatisfying Vollmann reader titled Expelled from Eden, I’ve read very little—and have no idea where to start.

The details I’ve gathered about Vollmann’s life and work—via previous research and a pair of recent profiles in Newsweek and the New York Times—are both tantalizing and forbidding:

• His ouevre includes a 3,000-page treatise on violence that he calls his life’s work, an unfinished 7-volume symbolic imagining of the history of Native American and European collisions in North America, and a trio of long, sometimes grotesque works of fiction commonly called his “Prostitution Trilogy.”

• Much of his early work is obsessed with prostitutes, and he himself has known and visited hundreds of them in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district and elsewhere; he says that if he ever won the Nobel, he’d give some of the prize money to prostitutes

• Once, he bought a Thai prostitute out of sex slavery and sent her to school in Bangkok

• He’s visited war zones in Cambodia, Somalia, and Iraq, and one of his first works of nonfiction was based on his experience helping the mujahideen fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 80s

• The FBI thought he might be the Unabomber and placed him under surveillance; there’s evidence that he is still being watched by the government

• His latest project, called The Book of Dolores, has Vollmann exploring his female alter ego, and features photos of him dressed in drag; the Times calls the new book “freaky”

• He does most of his writing in a barbed-wire-enclosed bunker that used to be a Mexican restaurant

• He’s got carpal tunnel from all the endless typing

• He’s got a daughter and wife—the latter of whom is a little weirded out by the cross-dressing, but no word on how she feels about her husband’s interest in war zones and prostitutes