William Vollmann
I recommend this heartbreaking long-form profile of the American writer William Vollmann: https://bigreaderbadgrades.substack.com/p/we-always-leave-things-unfinished
Vollmann writes exhaustively about North American history, sex workers, death, the environment, and the downtrodden. He is unsentimental, adventurous, and radically empathetic. His writing can be beautiful, upsetting, challenging, boring, frustrating, titillating, repulsive, sad, and exciting.
There is no popular appetite for his books - it is revealed that his forthcoming novel, a 3,000+ page exploration of a CIA analyst and his homeless son, was sold for only $10,000. It goes without saying that there is also not a market for a long-form profile about the man, and so this was self-financed by it's author, Alexander Sorondo. I am happy it exists.
Here is an excerpt:
What makes the Cuba situation so “sad” (and he does keep calling it sad despite the swell of what looks like anger) is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Mexico wants to give them oil. The island could bounce back in a few weeks. But Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba.
“I was just so disgusted and ashamed of our country to see all these heaps of garbage that can’t be picked up, cuz there’s no fuel,” and so residents are dragging their trash outside to the street and burning it in piles. “You’re breathing the smoke of garbage. And there are these people bending over through the smoking garbage trying to find food. So we’re uh,” blinking like to ground himself, facing forward and switching to his prose voice, that monotone, “we’re really making Cuba great again,” irreverent.
No sense getting worked-up about these things.
“I’ll be dead very soon.”