Nothing Foreign about It: Talking with Omar El Akkad
Omar El Akkad discusses his debut novel American War, suicide terrorism, fossil fuels, and blankets.
...more
Posts Tagged: Afghanistan
There Is No Answer: Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles
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”
“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
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
Schultz enables readers to see past their own perspectives and empathize with both the Afghan child and the American war widow.
...more
Womanly Arts
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
Sand Becoming Glass
You can call a soldier a hero or a murderer. You can call them a warrior or a monster. You can call them savior or Satan. You could call them Brother. Maybe even mother.
...more“A Star That Peers Through Your Window”
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”). […]
...more“Home Not At Home”
After Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was ousted and executed by General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, his son Murtaza went into exile and organized a resistance from the UK, Syria, and Afghanistan, where his daughter Fatima Bhutto was born. Bhutto documented her childhood in her 2011 memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword. In the most recent […]
...more
Bodies in Space: Teaching after Trauma
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.
...moreSoldiers-Turned-Authors on War Literature
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.
...more
Letters to Laura from a McDonald’s in Brooklyn
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
Whitney Terrell discusses war, gender, and fiction vs. reality in his new novel, The Good Lieutenant, about a female soldier in Iraq.
...more
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.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: 69 Love Songs
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
A Letter to My Father That He Will Never Read
What would I even say if I was to answer that long-awaited phone call? Would the light of forgiveness carry me fearlessly into tomorrow?
...moreLiterature Out of Pain in Afghanistan
As part of Electric Literature’s The Writing Life Around the World series, Fazilhaq Hashimi discusses the influence of pain and social activism on the literary landscape in Afghanistan: In Afghanistan, we do not write for fun, passion, or money but to express the immeasurable pain inside. Maybe that’s how the actual writing is. There must be […]
...more
American Ambiguity
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
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
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
The Rumpus Interview with Colin D. Halloran
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
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.
...more
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.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Elliot Ackerman
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 .
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
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 […]
...moreStretching the Truth
At the Atlantic, Jenny Nordberg looks at what it’s like for Afghani girls, posing as boys, to put food on the table: It is simple math—if she is caught, no one eats. And every day she fears discovery. All that Niima is ordered to do, she does very quickly. She climbs to fetch store offerings from […]
...more
Bedrooms of the Fallen by Ashley Gilbertson
I lost my photo. Part of it, anyway. I lost some of the painless pride of ownership, the selfish satisfaction of creation.
...more
The Girls Do Cute Things
Her parents, in the past, tried to surrender her to the state, asking the state to force her to go to school. They didn’t want to be held responsible for her any more. Now, it’s Maya who wants to live somewhere else.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Masha Hamilton
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