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Rightly the most celebrated in the recent wave of war literature, the National Book Award-winning Redeployment is a short story collection that manages to vividly depict an astonishing array of experiences, from ground troops to chaplainship to the Foreign Service. Darkly funny, nuanced, and merciless in its takedowns of military bureaucracy, critic Michiko Kakutani described Redeployment as, “Gritty, unsparing and fiercely observed…[leaving] us with a harrowing sense of the war in Iraq as it was experienced, day by day, by individual soldiers."

Eat the Apple, Matt Young’s memoir of the Iraq War, is an absorbing, experimental, and deeply uneasy read. Young combines storytelling with cartoons, lists, prose poetry, and an inventive approach to narrative structure to convey war’s impact on his mind. An excellent writer, Young endears himself to the reader with his self-effacing humor and pathos, only to repulse them with stories about casual violence toward animals and the bullying endemic to the Marine Corps. Eat the Apple is upsetting, striking, and — in form and content — a fascinating portrait of the complicated division of self that military service demands.

This beautifully written novel about a friendship between two young soldiers in Iraq is notable for the attention it pays to their families back home. Private John Bartle is devastated by the death of his close friend, Private Daniel Murphy, and much of The Yellow Birds alternates between Bartle’s memories of their experiences training and in Iraq (including some intense battle scenes) and his struggles to readapt to life at home. The reader only slowly learns what happened to Murphy, but we know from the outset that Bartle promised Murphy’s mother he’d keep him safe, and his guilt over that impossible promise is at the heart of this powerful novel.

Clamor, Fenton’s award-winning debut poetry collection, chronicles one woman’s experiences waiting for her husband to return from his job as an Army medic in Baghdad, and then dealing with the impact of his deployment on their relationship once he returns. Fenton is a brilliant and meticulous wordsmith; her attention to sound, structure, and word choice manage to distill the longing and anxiety of waiting, and then wondering, into clear, flawless notes. Not much attention is paid to the families of service members — Clamor insists on the equivalent complexity of the home experience.

Crawford’s memoir is controversial, not for its content but over whether or not it’s decently written. It’s a freshman effort and definitely veers into cliché (the brotherhood of war, the conversion of innocence into complicity, etc.), but we think it’s worth the read for a couple of reasons: First, while a more deft writer can take the truth at the root of a cliché and make it revelatory (see Klay above), the familiar tropes in Crawford’s writing lend it authenticity — his stories feel both singular and representative of the ways many soldiers feel and act. Second, the last chapter is exemplary: ambiguous, upsetting, and clarifying all at once. You’ll be thinking about it years later.

What Brian Turner’s poetry lacks in lyricism, it makes up for in precision: Here, Bullet makes explicit the physical violence of war and its psychological aftermath. Turner’s power is in the details; the poems in this collection are filled with specific times and places, characters’ memories, and people’s names, and are governed by an empathy and insistence that all those involved in the conflict be seen. Even now, 15 years after the US invasion of Iraq, few are writing about the war with Turner's transparency and moral nuance.