*** Welcome to piglix ***

Redeployment (short story collection)

Redeployment
Redeployment (Klay novel).jpg
Author Phil Klay
Country United States
Language English
Subject Iraq War (2003–2010)
Genre Historical Fiction
Publisher Penguin Press
Publication date
March 4, 2014
Media type Print
Pages 291 pp
ISBN
OCLC 852221707

Redeployment is a collection of short stories by American writer Phil Klay. His first published book, it won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle's 2014 John Leonard Award given for a best first book in any genre.

The book comprises twelve stories that chronicle the experiences of soldiers and veterans who served during the Iraq War, specifically Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003 – 2010). Klay served in the United States Marine Corps from 2005 to 2009. He was deployed to the Anbar Province in 2007–8.

Klay has said that before and during his service in Iraq he did not have a "clear sense" that he was going to write about war, but that when he shared his plan to enter the military upon graduation, his Dartmouth College teacher and mentor, the American poet Tom Sleigh:

"...made sure that before I went I'd read Tolstoy, Hemingway, Isaac Babel and David Jones. He thought it important to study what the greatest minds had to say about war."

Klay spent four years writing Redeployment. The book's title story first appeared in the literary magazine Granta. It was reprinted in Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War, an anthology of war fiction. Klay has stated that the process of writing the stories that became Redeployment involved years of meticulous research.

Klay has described his own deployment in Iraq as "a mild experience" where he did not see the war itself but only the effects of war second hand. To depict the war, he created a dozen characters, each with a different set of experiences and perspectives. Avoiding cliches and creating "prototypes", he has said, "was something I took very seriously. I did a lot a research, I talked to a lot of Marines, and spent a lot of time thinking about the subjects. Doing the kind of imaginative work, drafting stories over and over again until I had something that felt emotionally honest, which is also not the same as something that's going to please everyone who’s been through that experience." He said he needed multiples voices because:


...
Wikipedia

...