It’s kind of depressing that I’m so fascinated with these big “God and death and war” themes that are always banging around in my head. I think it’s because I like the gravity of even the smallest decisions in heightened crisis situations. It makes things so prominent and visceral. This gravity also makes the beauty in these moments of crisis more beautiful and love that much stronger. Ultimately, I’ve spent the last thirteen years trying to square with my time overseas and chase some version of that heightened meaning in civilian life. The contrast between being a school teacher and soldier really makes all of that clear.
This book gave me license to bend the truth, the setting, and to use myself, or some bizarre version of myself as a main character. O’Brien is the one who made it okay for me to do whatever the hell I wanted in the stories I wrote. It may not appear to be avant garde writing, but it certainly showed me how to play with convention and storytelling. Like a lot of veteran writers in the last thirty years, I used this book as a template in a lot of ways.
The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
'The Things They Carried' is, on its surface, a sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme.
But while Vietnam is central to 'The Things They Carried', it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the human heart - about the terrible weight of those things we carry through…
Orwell captures the dilemma of empire so well that every time I read it, my nerves get raw. It’s a trap. Everyone is dehumanized, the oppressors and the oppressed. The sneering townspeople, the trips on the football pitch, the clear-sighted way the crowd intuits the relationship between themselves and the young policeman all ring true. The villagers can control him because they understand the expectations he has as an official of the crown. They use his strength against him to get what they want. He doesn’t want to kill the elephant, but it’s expected of him, so he gruesomely shoots into the elephant's mouth till, like the British empire, it finally dies. The villagers pillage the carcass for meat. For Orwell, empire itself is brutal suicide.
'Shooting an Elephant' is Orwell's searing and painfully honest account of his experience as a police officer in imperial Burma; killing an escaped elephant in front of a crowd 'solely to avoid looking a fool'. The other masterly essays in this collection include classics such as 'My Country Right or Left', 'How the Poor Die' and 'Such, Such were the Joys', his memoir of the horrors of public school, as well as discussions of Shakespeare, sleeping rough, boys' weeklies and a spirited defence of English cooking. Opinionated, uncompromising, provocative and hugely entertaining, all show Orwell's unique ability to get to…
For my money, Hemingway is the greatest American short story writer. He is spare and direct until he isn’t. The meter and clipped phrasing and short sentences set up bigger, longer runs that are beautiful and often explain what it’s like to be a human being without being obvious or careless. They never feel false and are edited down to the bone. That’s probably what I learned most from Hemingway, the editing. Just picking a story, “On the Quai at Smyrna,” has such a staccato matter-of-factness that belies just how awful the situation there on the pier must have been. The narrator is hardened and recounts the events so matter-of-factly that you know they’ll come back later, once he is home and has time to reflect on them.
The complete, authoritative collection of Ernest Hemingway's short fiction, including classic stories like "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," along with seven previously unpublished stories.
In this definitive collection of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s short stories, readers will delight in Hemingway’s most beloved classics such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Hills Like White Elephants," and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and will discover seven new tales published for the first time in this collection, totaling in sixty stories. This collection demonstrates Hemingway’s ability to write beautiful prose for each distinct story,…
I know this is a bit of a conceit. Jay wasn’t really changed by war in the way we’re talking about, but he did return a different man than when he left. I really just wanted to talk about the influence of Fitzgerald’s musicality, his incredible prose, on how I try to write. He’s writing a song, it seems to me, and when I read it, it’s like a spell and I think I vibrate at a different frequency than before I read it. Hunter Thompson had it too, but Fitzgerald was before him. Also, it has my favorite last line ever…I probably wrote an entire book based on that line.
As the summer unfolds, Nick is drawn into Gatsby's world of luxury cars, speedboats and extravagant parties. But the more he hears about Gatsby - even from what Gatsby himself tells him - the less he seems to believe. Did he really go to Oxford University? Was Gatsby a hero in the war? Did he once kill a man? Nick recalls how he comes to know Gatsby and how he also enters the world of his cousin Daisy and her wealthy husband Tom. Does their money make them any happier? Do the stories all connect? Shall we come to know…
It doesn’t end well for old Seymour in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” but the way Salinger writes him, with his ability to revere the innocent child while detesting the phony adult world rings true. This is why Salinger is dangerous. If reading a book like this rings too true, it’s hard not to go through life seeing the adult world as corrupt and duplicitous. It puts a bug in one’s operating system. Salinger is kind of patient zero for a lot of young people who see the world a bit differently. On the surface, Nine Stories doesn’t seem like a war book, but both Seymour and Salinger himself fought the Germans in France, and without actually mentioning the war, it’s clear that the battle Seymour loses is with PTSD.
The "original, first-rate, serious, and beautiful" short fiction (New York Times Book Review) that introduced J. D. Salinger to American readers in the years after World War II, including "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and the first appearance of Salinger's fictional Glass family. Nine exceptional stories from one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane, and frequently affecting, Nine Stories sits alongside Salinger's very best work--a treasure that will passed down for many generations to come. The stories:
A Perfect Day for Bananafish
Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut
Just Before the War with the Eskimos
The Laughing…
No matter what we think we are achieving, eventually, imperial wars come home to roost. A generation of men asked to watch children suffer without flinching return to America. The ethics of the wars of Pax Americana become the ways and mores in our own streets. The logic of the war in Afghanistan is transferred to the classrooms of Chicago’s public high schools. America is reborn in a shape we never intended.
Lyke’s setting shifts, but forever casts the main character as someone trying to maintain his sanity, humanity, and kindness as the state and its bureaucracy try to take them away. In the tradition of Camus, Orwell, or Steinbeck, Lyke’s work illuminates human nature and seeks the truth hidden under layers of grit.
I have been to, and loved, North, Central, and especially East Africa for over fifty years. Only six times have I been to Africa on holiday; more often, perhaps twenty or more times, as a television producer. Working in Africa gains a perspective of reality that the glories of vacation do not. Each has its place, each its pitfalls like stalled plane rides with emergency landings in the bush or attacks by wildlife. But, in the end, the magic of the “otherness,” what an old friend called “primitava” captures one’s soul and changes your life.
Keen to rekindle their love of East African wildlife adventures after years of filming, extreme dangers, and rescues, producer Pero Baltazar, safari guide Mbuno Waliangulu, and Nancy Breiton, camerawoman, undertake a filming walking adventure north of Lake Rudolf, crossing from Kenya into Ethiopia along the Omo River, following a herd of elephant making their annual migration.
Stumbling onto an elephant poaching, the team become embroiled in true financing of terrorism for al Shabaab –ivory sales–and are determined to stop the slaughter at any cost. Ivory trade financing terrorism involves UN refugee camps with two hundred thousand displaced Somali persons, powerful…
A documentary team hiking through East Africa collides with a gang of deadly poachers, in this gripping adventure by the author of Kidnapped on Safari.
Years of filming, extreme dangers, and daring rescues have taken their toll on documentary producer Pero Baltazar and his team. To relax and reconnect with the East African wildlife they love, Pero organizes a walking safari for him, his camerawoman Nancy Breiton, and their elite guide Mbuno Waliangulu. Still, Pero has trouble truly disconnecting from work. When the team comes across a herd of elephants making their annual migration north of Lake Rudolf, Pero decides…
