Rumpus Original Fiction: The Tangible Darkness
The ground trembles, setting his flesh and bones vibrating.
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Join NOW!The ground trembles, setting his flesh and bones vibrating.
...moreIt took them almost two weeks to walk to Seoul, such was their pace.
...moreAyşe Papatya Bucak discusses her debut story collection, THE TROJAN WAR MUSEUM.
...moreWe drive out, shedding tears inside, only for ourselves, only for the beauty.
...morePaul Crenshaw discusses his debut essay collection, THIS ONE WILL HURT YOU.
...moreIndividual soldiers become a formless mass. War becomes an end in itself.
...moreWhat happens when we play along with something not real—does it become real?
...moreSpeech seemed like an irreverence, as if the empty schools were tombs.
...moreJay Baron Nicorvo discusses his debut novel, The Standard Grand, how easy it is for civilians to forget about soldiers and veterans, and his longstanding love of animals.
...moreWhen you pick up a pen instead of a rifle, you’re fighting an entirely different battle. This is my duty. This is my patriotism.
...moreAs we begin our own Age of the Strongman, Hussein’s almost effortless manipulation—of soldiers expecting exactly that behavior—shows how susceptible we all might be to the sheer force of a big personality.
...moreIn Akkad’s dystopian scenario, the US faces a resurgent Mexico and a vast and newly powerful North African-Arabian empire.
...moreSchultz enables readers to see past their own perspectives and empathize with both the Afghan child and the American war widow.
...moreYou 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.
...moreWelcome to This Week in Books, where we highlight books just released by small and independent presses. Books have always been a symbol for and means of spreading knowledge and wisdom, and they are an important part of our toolkit in fighting for social justice. If we’re going to move our national narrative away from […]
...moreThere should be no forgetting, much less forgiveness, of what happened during the Vietnam War.
...moreWhitney Terrell discusses war, gender, and fiction vs. reality in his new novel, The Good Lieutenant, about a female soldier in Iraq.
...moreThis week, Guernica has a new story from author and veteran Odie Lindsey, whose debut story collection about soldiers coming home from war, We Come to Our Senses, will be published by W.W. Norton later this month. Included in the collection, “Bird (on back)” picks up in the middle of a disintegrating relationship between an […]
...moreAs 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.
...moreWhat would I even say if I was to answer that long-awaited phone call? Would the light of forgiveness carry me fearlessly into tomorrow?
...moreEach character achieves independence in his own way, but independence winds up looking a lot like loneliness.
...morePulitzer Prize–winning author Adam Johnson talks about his new book, Fortune Smiles, fiction and voice, veterans and defectors, solar-powered robots and self-driving cars, and infrared baseball caps that can blind security cameras.
...moreMatt 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[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.
...moreThe notion that the truth about combat cannot be described in a book goes back to the American Civil War, at least.
...moreStanton re-gathered himself, still wearing a smile after being shot in the face, and went back to work.
...moreI lost my photo. Part of it, anyway. I lost some of the painless pride of ownership, the selfish satisfaction of creation.
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