<blockquote>

because i was bad in my last life.

because allah has willed it.

because the rich do nothing for the poor.

because the poor do nothing for themselves.

because it is my destiny. </p> </blockquote>

These are just some of the answers to the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asks in cities and villages around the globe: "Why are you poor?" In the tradition of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Vollmann's Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and its quiet resignation. Poor People allows the poor to speak for themselves, explaining the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms. </p>

There is the alcoholic mother in Buddhist Thailand, sure that her poverty is punishment for transgressions in a former life, and her ten-year-old daughter, whose faith in her own innocence gives her hope that her sin in the last life was simply being rich. There is the Siberian-born beggar who pins her woes on a tick bite and a Gypsy curse more than a half century ago, and the homeless, widowed Afghan women who have been relegated to a "respected" but damning invisibility. There are Big and Little Mountain, two Japanese salarymen who lost their jobs suddenly and now live in a blue-tarp hut under a Kyoto bridge. And, most haunting of all, there is the faded, starving beggar-girl, staring empty-eyed on the back steps of Bangkok's Central Railroad Station, whose only response to Vollmann's query is simply, "I think I am rich." </p>

The result of Vollmann's fearless journey is a look at poverty unlike any other. Complete with more than 100 powerfully affecting photographs—taken of the interviewees by the author himself—this series of vignettes and searing insights represents a tremendous step toward an understanding of this age-old social ill. With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing eye, Vollmann invites his readers to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience. </p>

作者簡介

威廉‧福爾曼 William T. Vollmann

福爾曼著有多部長篇小說及故事集 ，當中包括批判暴力的七冊巨著《暴起與沉淪》（Rising Up and Rising Down），探索美國「火車扒客」地下文化的《行向無窮處》（Riding Toward Everywhere），記述性別跨越經驗的《朵蘿瑞絲之書》（The Book of Dolores） 等作品。二○○五年曾以《歐洲中央》（Europe Central）獲美國國家圖書獎。

福爾曼曾獲國際筆會美西中心小說獎（PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction）、席瓦‧奈波爾紀念獎（Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize）、懷丁作家獎（Whiting Writers' Award）等獎項。他的報導和小說創作亦常見於《紐約客》（The New Yorker）、《君子》（Esquire）、《Spin》、《格蘭塔》（Granta）等雜誌。現居加州沙加緬度 。

譯者簡介

徐麗松

台大外文系畢業，世紀交替之際旅居法國多年，陸續於巴黎第七大學、里昂第二大學及法國高等社會科學院修讀語言學及跨文化研究，並在法國及台灣從事英文、法文翻譯及跨界合作工作。