Posts by author
Caleb Cage
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War Narratives #8: Flashes of War by Katey Schultz
Schultz enables readers to see past their own perspectives and empathize with both the Afghan child and the American war widow.
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War Narratives #7: Turning a Corner
As we sat around telling the funniest stories we could remember from our time in Iraq, I noticed that the easy cynicism of our twenties was gone, and so was the rigid hierarchy of the military.
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War Narratives #6: The Rumpus Interview with Phil Klay
When you’re writing fiction, you can follow your own ignorance. You can write something and realize how flawed you are.
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War Narratives #5: Surge
But those who subscribe to the Surge narrative have to work very hard to choose and order their supporting facts.
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War Narratives #4: Meet the Civilians
Each character achieves independence in his own way, but independence winds up looking a lot like loneliness.
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War Narratives #3: The Rumpus Interview with Matt Gallagher
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.
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War Narratives #2: Trauma Writing
[I]f we don’t explore wartime trauma in literature, we will never understand war’s impact in personal or social terms; never understand the incredible variety of responses to trauma, with all its nuances and exceptions.
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War Narratives #1: Truth and Fiction
The notion that the truth about combat cannot be described in a book goes back to the American Civil War, at least.
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My Life as a Foreign Country by Brian Turner
Caleb Cage reviews My Life as a Foreign Country by Brian Turner today in Rumpus Books.
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“Fire and Forget,” by Roy Scranton, Matt Gallagher, Colum McCann, and others
“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…
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“The Yellow Birds,” by Kevin Powers
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…
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“Fobbit,” by David Abrams
“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…