About this item

"War porn," n. Videos, images, and narratives featuring graphic violence, often brought back from combat zones, viewed voyeuristically or for emotional gratification. Such media are often presented and circulated without context, though they may be used as evidence of war crimes. War porn is also, in Roy Scranton's searing debut novel, a metaphor for the experience of war in the age of the War on Terror, the fracturing and fragmentation of perspective, time, and self that afflicts soldiers and civilians alike, and the global networks and face-to-face moments that suture our fragmented lives together. In War Porn three lives fit inside one another like nesting dolls: a restless young woman at an end-of-summer barbecue in Utah; an American soldier in occupied Baghdad; and Qasim al-Zabadi, an Iraqi math professor, who faces the US invasion of his country with fear, denial, and perseverance. As War Porn cuts from America to Iraq and back again, as home and hell merge, we come to see America through the eyes of the occupied, even as we see Qasim become a prisoner of the occupation. Through the looking glass of War Porn, Scranton reveals the fragile humanity that connects Americans and Iraqis, torturers and the tortured, victors and their victims.



About the Author

Roy Scranton

Roy Scranton is the author of TOTAL MOBILIZATION: WORLD WAR II AND AMERICAN LITERATURE (University of Chicago Press, 2019) , I HEART OKLAHOMA! (Soho Press, 2019) , WE'RE DOOMED. NOW WHAT? (Soho Press, 2018) , WAR PORN (Soho Press, 2016) , and LEARNING TO DIE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE (City Lights, 2015) . He earned an MA from the New School for Social Research and a PhD in English from Princeton, and has been awarded a Whiting Humanities Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. His work has appeared widely, including in the BEST SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2014, and has been called "fierce and provocative" (Elizabeth Kolbert) , "elegant, erudite, heartfelt & wise" (Amitav Ghosh) , "forceful and unsettling" (Michiko Kakutani) , and "brilliant" (Jeff VanderMeer) . [photo credit Ola Kjelbye]



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