Posts Tagged: Afghanistan

There Is No Answer: Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles

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As Sentilles makes clear, she is against the wars the United States is currently involved in, and war in general, but she’s critical of what that means. ...more

David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 13): “Letter to Simic from Boulder”

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"Wherever you are on earth, you are safe,” writes Richard Hugo. Really? ...more

The Last Book I Loved: Poeta en San Francisco by Barbara Jane Reyes

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Through incisive and uncompromising verse, Reyes unearths the hypocrisy at work in exalted American democracy... ...more

War Narratives #8: Flashes of War by Katey Schultz

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Schultz enables readers to see past their own perspectives and empathize with both the Afghan child and the American war widow. ...more

Womanly Arts

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This is the hearth. This is the knot. This is home. The woman bent over a sewing machine, the steady hum of the motor, the needle rising and sinking. ...more

“A Star That Peers Through Your Window”

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German children’s book author Thomas Mac Pfeifer spent over a year interviewing children who had migrated to Germany from war-stricken countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan with the purpose of hearing and collecting their favorite bedtime stories into one book, Ein Stern, der in dein Fenster schaut (“A star that peers through your window”).

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Bodies in Space: Teaching after Trauma

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Turning onto my street and looking south I feel the ground drop beneath me every time—I turn the corner and the sidewalk falls. I feel invisible then, as if I’ve vaporized. ...more

Soldiers-Turned-Authors on War Literature

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For NPR Books, Quil Lawrence talks with a handful of soldiers-turned-authors about the genre of war literature that has been catalyzed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These authors want their audiences to know that war is not all Hollywood-scale battle scenes, and warn against the glamorization of war stories and hero-worshipping of veterans.

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Letters to Laura from a McDonald’s in Brooklyn

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Tonight my loneliness is infinite and I could eat dinner or dance with my limbs wild because there is no gravity keeping me grounded. ...more

The Rumpus Interview with Whitney Terrell

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Whitney Terrell discusses war, gender, and fiction vs. reality in his new novel, The Good Lieutenant, about a female soldier in Iraq. ...more

The Saturday Rumpus Essay: 69 Love Songs

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Everywhere people are shoving things into the ground—time capsules not to be opened until the year 2100, the more optimistic postmarked for 3000—letters to the future in the language of the now. ...more

American Ambiguity

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My racial awareness, perhaps even my awareness of myself as a person, self-consciousness, is a three-pronged paradox of shame, pride, and indifference. ...more

War Narratives #4: Meet the Civilians

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Each character achieves independence in his own way, but independence winds up looking a lot like loneliness. ...more

War Narratives #3: The Rumpus Interview with Matt Gallagher

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Matt Gallagher on blogging during his time in the Army, his memoir Kaboom and forthcoming novel Youngblood, and what makes for good literary fiction about wartime. ...more

Red Dawn

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But perhaps we were like people everywhere, trying to find some meaning in our existence, and an outside threat gave us both meaning and existence. ...more

The Rumpus Interview with Colin D. Halloran

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Writer and former US Army infantryman Colin D. Halloran on his new collection, Icarian Flux, how he used experimental narrative to explore his life with PTSD, and why he doesn't want to be known only as a "war poet." ...more

The Rumpus Interview with Elliot Ackerman

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Elliot Ackerman discusses his debut novel Green on Blue, fighting with the Marine Corps in the Second Battle of Fallujah, and being labeled as a journalist . ...more

This Week in Short Fiction

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On Wednesday evening, Phil Klay’s Redeployment won the National Book Award for fiction, making it the first short story collection to win the award since Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever in 1996. That’s 18 years. But what’s maybe more startling is that the collection, which takes multiple perspectives of people involved in and returning from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, stands nearly alone as a fictional account that has risen to the national level of attention since the war in Afghanistan began in 2003.

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The Rumpus Interview with Masha Hamilton

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Journalist and novelist Masha Hamilton sits down with Maud Newton to discuss the influences behind her latest book, What Changes Everything, the intricacies of writing about conflict, and how her work in war zones has helped shape her fiction. ...more

How Do You Say “Ollie” in Pashto?

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In Kabul, Afghanistan, Oliver Percovich runs an NGO unlike any other: a skateboarding school for kids, called Skateistan.

Interestingly, in a country where girls are generally not allowed to ride bicycles (and are even sometimes attacked for going to school), almost half of Skateistan’s students are female, which this blog post calls “the highest rate of female participation in skateboarding out of any country in the world.”

Rock on, sk8r bois and grrrls.

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