From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories - personal and collective.Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay - playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized - has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories - moments of joy and oblivion - and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
|
9780374293574
|
Hardcover
The Rabbit Hutch
By Gunty, Tess
A stunning debut novel about the quest for transcendence and the desire for love set in a crumbling apartment building in the post-industrial MidwestOnce a bustling industrial center, Vacca Vale, Indiana is now no more than another notch in the Rust Belt, and its inhabitants are no exception. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of these people, those left behind, now reside quietly out-of-place. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck. C8 harbors an extraordinary fear. But C4 is of particular interest. Here live four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster care system: three teenage boys and one girl, Blandine. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine is plagued by her past and by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her, but actively harmed her.
Knopf
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9780593534663
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Hardcover
Hell of a Book
By Mott, Jason
Publisher: n/a
|
9780593330968
|
Hardcover
Interior Chinatown
By Yu, Charles
A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, and escaping the roles we are forced to play - by the author of the infinitely inventive How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He's merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy - the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that's what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more. Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes, Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterly novel yet.
Pantheon
|
9780307907196
|
Hardcover
Trust Exercise
By Choi, Susan
"Brilliant and challenging . . . An uncanny evocation of the not-so-distant past." -- Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of Mrs. FletcherPulitzer finalist Susan Choi's multipart, narrative-upending novel in which what happens in high school does not stay in high school but reverberates through lives -- and across generationsIn an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving "Brotherhood of the Arts," two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed -- or untoyed with -- by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school's walls -- until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true -- though it's not false, either. It takes until the book's stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place -- revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.
Henry Holt and Co.
|
9781250309884
|
Hardcover
The Friend
By Nunez, Sigrid
FINALIST FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD "Nunez's prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts - the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence." -The New York Times Book Review"A penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory...Nunez has a wry, withering wit." - NPR"[A] sneaky gut punch of a novel...a consummate example of the human-animal tale." - Harper's MagazineA moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.
Riverhead Books
|
9780735219441
|
Hardcover
Sing, Unburied, Sing
By Ward, Jesmyn
WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and a New York Times bestseller, this majestic, stirring, and widely praised novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, the story of a family on a journey through rural Mississippi, is a "tour de force" (O, The Oprah Magazine) and a timeless work of fiction that is destined to become a classic.Jesmyn Wards historic second National Book Award-winner is "perfectly poised for the moment" (The New York Times) , an intimate portrait of three generations of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. "Wards writing throbs with life, grief, and love ... this book is the kind that makes you ache to return to it" (Buzzfeed) . Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesnt lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who wont acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager. His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sisters lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her childrens father is White. She wants to be a better mother but cant put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when shes high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances. When the childrens father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love. Rich with Wards distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic and unforgettable family story and "an odyssey through rural Mississippis past and present" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) .
SCRIBNER
|
9781501126062
|
Hardcover
The Underground Railroad
By Whitehead, Colson
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the #1 New York Times bestseller from Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor - engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey - hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Doubleday
|
9780385542364
|
Paperback
Fortune Smiles
By Johnson, Adam
The National Book Award-winning story collection from the author of The Orphan Masters Son offers something rare in fiction: a new way of looking at the world.. "MASTERFUL." - The Washington Post "ENTRANCING." - O: The Oprah Magazine "PERCEPTIVE AND BRAVE." - The New York Times. Throughout these six stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal, giving voice to the perspectives we dont often hear.. In "Nirvana," a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finds solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In "Hurricanes Anonymous," a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind.. WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK . NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Miami Herald * San Francisco Chronicle * USA Today . AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post * NPR * Marie Claire * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * BuzzFeed * The Daily Beast * Los Angeles Magazine * The Independent * BookPage * Kirkus Reviews. "Remarkable . . . Adam Johnson is one of Americas greatest living writers." - The Huffington Post. "Haunting, harrowing . . . Johnsons writing is as rich in compassion as it is in invention, and that rare combination makes Fortune Smiles worth treasuring." - USA Today. "Fortune Smiles [blends] exotic scenarios, morally compromised characters, high-wire action, rigorously limber prose, dense thickets of emotion, and, most critically, our current techno-moment." - The Boston Globe "Johnsons boundary-pushing stories make for exhilarating reading." - San Francisco Chronicle
Random House
|
9780812997477
|
Hardcover
Redeployment
By Klay, Phil
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction"Redeployment is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad. Its the best thing written so far on what the war did to peoples souls." - Dexter Filkins, The New York Times Book ReviewSelected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post Book World, Amazon, and more Phil Klays Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos. In "Redeployment", a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in suburbia, surrounded by people "who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died." In "After Action Report", a Lance Corporal seeks expiation for a killing he didnt commit, in order that his best friend will be unburdened. A Morturary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remains - of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both. A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious Colonel. And in the darkly comic "Money as a Weapons System", a young Foreign Service Officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball. These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship and violence that make up a soldiers daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldiers homecoming. Redeployment has become a classic in the tradition of war writing. Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: one of extremes and one of loss. Written with a hard-eyed realism and stunning emotional depth, this work marks Phil Klay as one of the most talented new voices of his generation.
Blackouts
By Torres, Justin
From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories - personal and collective.Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay - playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized - has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories - moments of joy and oblivion - and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes.
The Rabbit Hutch
By Gunty, Tess
A stunning debut novel about the quest for transcendence and the desire for love set in a crumbling apartment building in the post-industrial MidwestOnce a bustling industrial center, Vacca Vale, Indiana is now no more than another notch in the Rust Belt, and its inhabitants are no exception. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of these people, those left behind, now reside quietly out-of-place. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck. C8 harbors an extraordinary fear. But C4 is of particular interest. Here live four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster care system: three teenage boys and one girl, Blandine. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine is plagued by her past and by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her, but actively harmed her.
Hell of a Book
By Mott, Jason
Interior Chinatown
By Yu, Charles
A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, and escaping the roles we are forced to play - by the author of the infinitely inventive How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He's merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy - the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that's what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more. Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes, Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterly novel yet.
Trust Exercise
By Choi, Susan
"Brilliant and challenging . . . An uncanny evocation of the not-so-distant past." -- Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of Mrs. FletcherPulitzer finalist Susan Choi's multipart, narrative-upending novel in which what happens in high school does not stay in high school but reverberates through lives -- and across generationsIn an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving "Brotherhood of the Arts," two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed -- or untoyed with -- by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school's walls -- until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true -- though it's not false, either. It takes until the book's stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place -- revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.
The Friend
By Nunez, Sigrid
FINALIST FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD "Nunez's prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts - the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence." -The New York Times Book Review"A penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory...Nunez has a wry, withering wit." - NPR"[A] sneaky gut punch of a novel...a consummate example of the human-animal tale." - Harper's MagazineA moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.
Sing, Unburied, Sing
By Ward, Jesmyn
WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and a New York Times bestseller, this majestic, stirring, and widely praised novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, the story of a family on a journey through rural Mississippi, is a "tour de force" (O, The Oprah Magazine) and a timeless work of fiction that is destined to become a classic.Jesmyn Wards historic second National Book Award-winner is "perfectly poised for the moment" (The New York Times) , an intimate portrait of three generations of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. "Wards writing throbs with life, grief, and love ... this book is the kind that makes you ache to return to it" (Buzzfeed) . Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesnt lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who wont acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager. His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sisters lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her childrens father is White. She wants to be a better mother but cant put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when shes high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances. When the childrens father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love. Rich with Wards distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic and unforgettable family story and "an odyssey through rural Mississippis past and present" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) .
The Underground Railroad
By Whitehead, Colson
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the #1 New York Times bestseller from Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor - engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey - hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Fortune Smiles
By Johnson, Adam
The National Book Award-winning story collection from the author of The Orphan Masters Son offers something rare in fiction: a new way of looking at the world.. "MASTERFUL." - The Washington Post "ENTRANCING." - O: The Oprah Magazine "PERCEPTIVE AND BRAVE." - The New York Times. Throughout these six stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal, giving voice to the perspectives we dont often hear.. In "Nirvana," a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finds solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In "Hurricanes Anonymous," a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind.. WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK . NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Miami Herald * San Francisco Chronicle * USA Today . AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post * NPR * Marie Claire * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * BuzzFeed * The Daily Beast * Los Angeles Magazine * The Independent * BookPage * Kirkus Reviews. "Remarkable . . . Adam Johnson is one of Americas greatest living writers." - The Huffington Post. "Haunting, harrowing . . . Johnsons writing is as rich in compassion as it is in invention, and that rare combination makes Fortune Smiles worth treasuring." - USA Today. "Fortune Smiles [blends] exotic scenarios, morally compromised characters, high-wire action, rigorously limber prose, dense thickets of emotion, and, most critically, our current techno-moment." - The Boston Globe "Johnsons boundary-pushing stories make for exhilarating reading." - San Francisco Chronicle
Redeployment
By Klay, Phil
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction"Redeployment is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad. Its the best thing written so far on what the war did to peoples souls." - Dexter Filkins, The New York Times Book ReviewSelected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post Book World, Amazon, and more Phil Klays Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos. In "Redeployment", a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in suburbia, surrounded by people "who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died." In "After Action Report", a Lance Corporal seeks expiation for a killing he didnt commit, in order that his best friend will be unburdened. A Morturary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remains - of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both. A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious Colonel. And in the darkly comic "Money as a Weapons System", a young Foreign Service Officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball. These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship and violence that make up a soldiers daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldiers homecoming. Redeployment has become a classic in the tradition of war writing. Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: one of extremes and one of loss. Written with a hard-eyed realism and stunning emotional depth, this work marks Phil Klay as one of the most talented new voices of his generation.