Afghanistan
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Literature 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…
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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.
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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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Red Dawn
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.
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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.”
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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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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 .
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This 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…
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Stretching 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…
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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.