What Authors, Readers, and Everyone Outside Institutional Publishing Should Understand About the HarperCollins Strike
Guest Column, Neon Literary’s How to Glow in the Dark (Substack)
“But the fact of the matter is, we can’t fight for you if we’re not in the room. And we can’t be in the room if we can’t afford to be there.”
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What You Don't Know About the HarperCollins Strike
Guest Q&A, Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study (Substack)
“There are more books being published today than at any other point in human history. The amount of information we encounter daily both in print and online is astronomical. And all the while, profits skyrocket, while the people who do all that work struggle to meet their most basic, human needs.”
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The War of Little Things
Review: The Soldier’s Truth by David Chrisinger (The Wrath-Bearing Tree)
“A detailed, unsparing, and empathetic—but never pitying—biography of a man who had plenty of chances to turn the job over to someone else but chose not to, kept choosing not to, because to do so in his mind would dishonor the doughboys, both living and dead, who’d come to see him as one of their own.”
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75 Years On, We’re Still Fighting the Battles of World War II
Essay (Medium.com)
“It’s not too late to fight the only war worth fighting, all the way to victory: that which frees all of us, equally.”
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The Courage of Stars
Or: Tony Stark Saved My Life
A Personal Essay (Medium.com)
“It’s really hard, mourning someone you love when there’s no body.”
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What Makes a War Story:
An Interview with Phil Klay
Interview (The Columbia Journal)
“If there’s one thing that honest narratives about these wars shouldn’t have, it’s a neat ending.”
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War Without Allegory:
World War I, Tolkien, and The Lord of the Rings
Essay (World War I Centennial Commission)
“The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory for World War I.
But it doesn’t have to be to be of that war—born from it and in spite of it.”
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Home is No Place At All
Review of "The Interpreters" (The Wrath-Bearing Tree)
"[A] face is just a face, except when it is a target."
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What Comes Back
Short fiction (originally published in Consequence Magazine, 2018)
"We’re here now, so what does it matter that I sometimes look up at the sky expecting artillery like it was rain?"
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Goodnight, Chesty Puller
Review: Eat the Apple by Matt Young (Consequence Magazine)
"Young makes it clear at the outset that this is not a Kill Memoir; it’s not the story of a man who becomes a hero. It’s not the book you expect, or want it to be, in part because Young didn’t experience things that way."
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Trapped in Amber
Review: Brave Deeds by David Abrams (Consequence Magazine)
"The only way out, as the saying goes, is through. The how is entirely up to the traveler. Where one person might choose wheels, another will choose a horse. The six-man hodgepodge that comprises David Abrams’ newest outing, Brave Deeds, choose to walk. For starters, anyways, because since when do odysseys ever go exactly according to plan?"
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A Different Kind of War Film
Review: "Dunkirk" (NYC Veterans Alliance)
"There is often very little room for or attention paid to nuance when it comes to war movies, especially those that take place during World War II. Thankfully, DUNKIRK gives us nuance in spades, in IMAX, in surround sound, unrelentingly."
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Women's Modern Warfare
Review: "Bullet Catchers" (NYC Veterans Alliance)
"From the outset we are confronted with the fact that this is a story about women and their relationship—literally, and figuratively—to war."
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My First War Novel
Essay (The Quivering Pen)
"Before I could vote in an election, get a tattoo, buy cigarettes, sign for a loan, or walk out of a liquor store with a bottle of bourbon, I wrote a war novel. Go big or go home."
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Marvel's Captain America: Civil War Triggered My PTSD
A Personal Essay (Medium.com)
"A life with mental illness is a long slog up a steep hill with no summit. There is no Iwo Jima of depression and PTSD, no hard-won peak on which to raise a triumphant flag that flaps in the breeze."