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From Stephen Elliott
“It is the job of literature to confront the terrible truths of what war has done and continues to do to us,” novelist Colum McCann writes in the foreword for Matt Gallagher and Roy Scranton’s new collection of wartime short stories, Fire and Forget. “It is also the job of literature to make sense of whatever small beauty we can rescue from the maelstrom,” he continues.
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The innocuous title of Kevin Powers’ debut novel The Yellow Birds is a reference to a military marching cadence. In its lyrics, as anyone who served in the military in recent decades might know, a peaceful bird is lured into a room and wantonly killed.
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“The real war is unlikely to be found in novels,” writes the late Paul Fussell, in his book Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. He argues that novels are unlikely purveyors of wartime truth because on one hand, novels are poor vehicles for harsh wartime truths, and on the other hand, because war is so unique, and so separate from the larger civilian society, there is no real way for books to convey the true combat experience.
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In his new epistolary novel, Dignity, about a new community founded in the unpaved cul-de-sacs and abandoned unfinished houses of the California desert, Ken Layne criticizes the material obsessions of contemporary capitalism.
David Oppegaard’s novel takes readers to a fictional town in the Nevada desert, where the earthly and the otherworldly mingle.
“That gorgeous cholla cactus outside the window also has horribly sharp spines. The desert is an incredibly violent environment. Plants and animals had to get mean as hell in order to survive.”
