Redeployment: National Book Award Winner - Softcover

Klay, Phil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143126822 ISBN 13: 9780143126829

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2015

Synopsis

Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction · Winner of the John Leonard First Book Prize · Selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post Book World, Amazon, and more 

Phil Klay's Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned.  Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos.

In "Redeployment", a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in suburbia, surrounded by people "who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died."  In "After Action Report", a Lance Corporal seeks expiation for a killing he didn't commit, in order that his best friend will be unburdened.  A Morturary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remains—of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both.  A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious Colonel.  And in the darkly comic "Money as a Weapons System", a young Foreign Service Officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball.  These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship and violence that make up a soldier's daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldier's homecoming.

Redeployment is poised to become a classic in the tradition of war writing.  Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: one of extremes and one of loss.  Written with a hard-eyed realism and stunning emotional depth, this work marks Phil Klay as one of the most talented new voices of his generation.

About this title

Review

The Art of War

Is Phil Klay's debut short story collection the best book about the Iraq War? --Kevin Nguyen

“Success was a matter of perspective. In Iraq it had to be.” This opening line, from one of the stories in Phil Klay's impressive debut collection, Redeployment, encapsulates what the book does best: through the many viewpoints represented by his twelve stories, Klay gives us not just a gripping portrait of the Iraq War but a glimpse into the true human cost of war, abroad and at home.

Though the United States entered Afghanistan and Iraq over a decade ago, novels about those conflicts have only begun gaining critical and commercial attention in the past few years. Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds, was one of the most talked about books of 2012; the same year, Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Both books were finalists for the National Book Award and included in our own Best of the Year list.

Powers and Fountain took very different approaches to the Iraq War. The Yellow Birds is a moving, often lyrical story that follows the tradition of in-the-trenches war fiction, taking hints from such classics as The Things They Carried all the way back to All Quiet on the Western Front (Powers is a veteran who received his MFA after returning to the U.S.); in contrast, Billy Lynn is more of a satire, taking place on home turf as the surviving members of Bravo Squad are paraded out during the halftime show of a Dallas Cowboys game.

Tonally and thematically, Redeployment falls somewhere in between these two novels. In its diversity of viewpoints, Klay has composed a complicated portrait of the war and its psychological effect on Iraq and at home in the States. Like Yellow Birds, these stories are moving and subtly philosophical; like Billy Lynn, Redeployment isn't afraid to be funny, to be brash.

Read the full review on Omnivoracious.

About the Author

Phil Klay is a Dartmouth grad and a veteran of the US Marine Corps. He served in Iraq during the Surge and subsequently received an MFA from Hunter College, where he studied with Colum McCann and Peter Carey, and worked as Richard Ford’s research assistant. His first published story, “Redeployment”, appeared in Granta’s Summer 2011 issue. That story led to the sale of his collection of the same name, which was published in seven countries. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, Tin House, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0143126822
• ISBN 13: 9780143126829
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304