Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 2014 National Book Award
Phil Klay's 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 didn't commit, in order that his best friend will be unburdened. A Morturary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remainsof 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 soldier's daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldier's homecoming.
Redeployment is poised to 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.
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." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"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." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"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." Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine
Review
"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."
The Wall Street Journal
Review
"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." Entertainment Weekly
Review
"One of the best debuts of the year." Portland Oregonian
Review
"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." Men's Journal
Review
"Phil Klay has written brilliant, true, and winning fiction on the Iraq War." The Daily Beast
Review
"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." Publishers Weekly (starred)
Review
"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." Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Review
"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." Library Journal
About the Author
Phil Klay is a Dartmouth grad and a veteran of the US Marine Corps. He served in Iraq during the Surge and subsequently received an MFA from Hunter College, where he studied with Colum McCann and Peter Carey, and worked as Richard Fords research assistant. His first published story, Redeployment”, appeared in Grantas Summer 2011 issue. That story led to the sale of his collection of the same name, which was published in seven countries. 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.
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