Phil Klay is a Dartmouth graduate and a veteran of the US Marine Corps. He served in Iraq during the surge and subsequently received an MFA from Hunter College. His first published story, “Redeployment”, appeared in Granta’s Summer 2011 issue. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, Tin House, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012.
Dexter Filkins, The New York Times Book Review:
“[Klay captures] on an intimate scale the ways in which the war in
Iraq evoked a unique array of emotion, predicament and heartbreak.
In Klay’s hands, Iraq comes across not merely as a theater of war
but as a laboratory of the human condition in extremis.
Redeployment is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad. It’s the
best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s
souls.”
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times:
“In Redeployment, his searing debut collection of short stories,
Phil Klay—a veteran of the United States Marine Corps, who served
in Iraq during the surge—gives the civilian reader a visceral
feeling for what it is like to be a soldier in a combat zone, and
what it is like to return home, still reeling from the dislocations
of war. Gritty, unsparing and fiercely observed, these stories
leave us with a harrowing sense of the war in Iraq as it was
experienced, day by day, by individual soldiers."
George Packer, The New Yorker:
“The best literary work thus far written by a veteran of America’s
recent wars.... Klay’s fiction peels back every pretty falsehood
and self-delusion in the encounter between veterans and the people
for whom they supposedly fought.”
Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine:
“An excellent, upsetting debut collection of short stories. Klay’s
own view is everywhere, existential and practical, at home and
abroad, distributed with wonderful clarity of voice and harrowing
specificity of experience among Army chaplains, enlisted men,
Foreign Service officers, members of Mortuary Affair, and
more.”
The Wall Street Journal:
“The influences behind Mr. Klay’s writing go far beyond Iraq. At
times Redeployment recapitulates the remarkably tender,
self-conscious style that Tim O’Brien forged from his experiences
in Vietnam…Mr. Klay is able to surprise and provoke….Mr. Klay gives
a deeply disquieting view of a generation of soldiers reared on
war’s most terrible contradictions.”
Entertainment Weekly:
“Klay—a Marine who served during the surge—has an eye and an ear
for a single searing line of dialogue or a scene of maddening
dissonance that can pierce your soul….Klay brilliantly manages to
wring some sense out of the nonsensical—resulting in an
extraordinary, if unnerving, literary feat.”
San Francisco Chronicle:
“Klay's closely observed debut collection of stories…makes a fine
contribution….Klay establishes an impressive authority over his
subject, which he maintains throughout the book in a clipped and
jargon-laden prose.”
Portland Oregonian:
“One of the best debuts of the year.”
Men’s Journal:
“In a book that's drawing comparisons to classic war literature
like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Klay examines the deep
conflict, in all of us, between wanting to tell our stories and
wanting to protect them from being diminished or
misunderstood.”
The Daily Beast:
“Phil Klay has written brilliant, true, and winning fiction on the
Iraq War.”
Grantland:
“Perhaps the most vital short story collection to emerge in the
past few years….Redeployment falls somewhere between the
in-the-trenches lyricism of Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds and the
bold satire of Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. And
yet, it feels more urgent than both…. Redeployment is urgent,
smart, and darkly comic.”
Publishers Weekly (starred):
"Klay grasps both tough-guy characterization and life spent in the
field, yet he also mines the struggle of soldiers to be emotionally
freed from the images they can’t stop seeing. It’s clear that Klay,
himself a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps who served in Iraq, has
parlayed his insider’s knowledge of soldier-bonding and emotional
scarring into a collection that proves a powerful statement on the
nature of war, violence, and the nuances of human nature."
Kirkus Reviews (starred):
“A sharp set of stories....Klay’s grasp of bureaucracy and bitter
irony here rivals Joseph Heller and George Orwell....A no-nonsense
and informed reckoning with combat.”
Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal:
“Important reading; pay attention.”
Lawrence Rungren, Library Journal:
"Harrowing at times and blackly comic at others, the author’s first
collection could become for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts what
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is for the Vietnam War."
Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk:
"If you want to know the real cost of war for those who do the
fighting, read Redeployment. These stories say it all, with an
eloquence and rare humanity that will simultaneously break your
heart and give you reasons to hope."
Nathan Englander, author of What We Talk About When We Talk
About Anne Frank:
"As we try to understand the human costs of yet another foreign
conflict, Phil Klay brings us the stories of the American
combatants, told in a distinct, new, and powerful voice."
Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!:
"Redeployment is a stunning, upsetting, urgently necessary
book about the impact of the Iraq war on both soldiers and
civilians. Klay's writing is searing and powerful, unsparing of its
characters and its readers, art made from a soldier's fearless
commitment to confront those losses that can't be tallied in
statistics. 'Be honest with me,' a college student asks a returning
veteran in one story, and Phil Klay's answer is a challenge of its
own: these stories demand and deserve our attention.
Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead:
"Phil Klay's stories are tightly wound psychological thrillers. The
global wars of our last decade weave in and out of these affecting
tales about characters who sound and feel like your neighbors. Klay
comes to us through Leo Tolstoy, Ray Carver, and Ann Beattie. It's
a thrill to read a young writer so brilliantly parsing the
complexities and vagaries of war. That he does so with surgical
precision and artful zest makes this a must-read."
Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin:
"When the history of these times are finally shaken out, and the
shredders have all been turned off, we will turn to writers like
Phil Klay to finally understand the true nature of who we were, and
where we have been, and where we are still going. He slips himself
in under the skin of the war with a muscular language and an agile
heart and a fair amount of complicated doubt. Redeployment
will be one of the great story collections of recent times. Phil
Klay is a writer of our times. I can't wait to see what he does
next."
Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone:
“To most, the war in Iraq is a finished chapter in history. Not so
to the Marines, family members, and State Department employees in
Phil Klay's electrifying debut collection, Redeployment. Thanks to
these provocative and haunting stories, the war will also become
viscerally real to readers. Phil Klay is a powerful new voice and
Redeployment stands tall with the best war writing of this
decade.”
Patrick McGrath, author of Trauma:
"Redeployment is fiction of a very high order. These are war
stories, written with passion and urgency and consummate writerly
skill. There's a clarity here that's lacerating in its precision
and exhiliration in its effect."
Lea Carpenter, author of Eleven Days:
"These stories are surgically precise strikes to the heart; you
can't read them without recalling other classic takes on war and
loss—Conrad, Herr, Hemingway. Klay maps the cast of our recent
Middle East conflicts and illuminates its literal, and
philosophical center: human casualty."
Roxana Robinson, author of Sparta:
“These are gorgeous stories—fierce, intelligent and heartbreaking.
Phil Klay, a former Marine, brings us both the news from Iraq and
the news from back home. His writing is bold and sure, and full of
all sorts of authority—literary, military and just plain human.
This is news we need to hear, from a new writer we need to
know about.”
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