In "The Atlas," William T. Vollmann arranges 53 gritty travel narratives as a kind of card deck of the world, plus one. At the start, a "Compiler's Note" offers various alternatives for the book's use. "Slide it under your buttocks when commencing the night's revels," Vollmann recommends. "Slay the nightmare flies of sleep with its hard covers."

There are nightmare flies aplenty in what follows. Each of these disturbing stories -- the book is a combination of fiction and autobiography -- is headed with a location and a date, as this obsessed and gifted chronicler globe hops from Sarajevo to Inuit Canada to Rangoon to dozens of other locales. Wherever the setting, the place is hell. Its residents live in torment, and Vollmann's own character is as vulnerable and wounded as anyone. Often the accounts concern whores and their johns. In "Butterfly Stories (1)," the narrator returns to Phnom Penh to look for his wife, a dance hall girl with the unlikely name of Vanna, whom he left there two years previously. In the end, he thinks he recognizes her as he buys her for a dance, understanding "the rule, which was as brutal as life: As long as he could keep dancing with her (and paying to dance), she'd still be his."

"White boys inhale too fast," says the hooker in "The Best Way to Smoke Crack," "'cause they think if they do they'll get more high." This is a place nonfiction doesn't often go. In the second of the "Butterfly Stories," a furious hooker berates the narrator, then makes him have sex with her without a condom, at the same time telling him that she has AIDS. "Can you feel my death crawling inside of you?" she asks. It's a world of pain, in which the narrator uses the temporary drug of perpetual motion because to stop would be to die.

In the title story, the narrator takes a train north into Canada, exhausted, yet flipping through the rest of the book's places in his head. "Everywhere he went, he'd say to himself: There's nothing for me here anymore. No more nowhere nobody." Leaving that nearly still center of this palindrome-like book, we re-enter the dangerous turf Vollmann takes for his own. Formally and otherwise, "The Atlas" is a tour de force.

-- Jim Paul