Dog Soldiers

In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action — and profit — by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered profiteering cops and professional killers — and the price of survival was dangerously high.

"[A] fastpaced, action-fraught novel....Stone has written a fine and absorbing second novel, all in all better than his first, deeper thematically and technically more proficient....[He is] a brilliant and prodigiously talented writer, one of America's best." Geoffery Clark, Ploughshares, The Literary Journal at Emerson College

"It is melodramatic, cruel, witty and grim." The New York Times Books of the Century

"Stone details an American drama of greed and violence in a world where life is cheap and the price of survival dangerously high." Time

"[Dog Soldiers] may be the strongest novel yet written about Vietnam -- or more precisely, about the war's psychic and moral consequences." David Ansen, Newsweek critic

"Joyce Carol Oats [sic] sounds like an effusive hysteric beside him: her books are self-indulgent fantasies. Stone gives you American experience....His new book confirms that he is one of our best novelists under forty." Richard Locke, New York Times

Robert Stone is the author of A Flag Sunrise, Children of the Light, and Outerbridge Reach. He won the National Book Award for Dog Soldiers and the Faulkner Foundation Award for A Hall of Mirrors. He lives in Connecticut.