All the Ruined Men

March 1, 2022

A debut author at 80, Campbell resists stereotyping as she explores the lives and desires of women aged 60 to 90 in Cat Brushing. From public school teacher and NYU MFA graduate Fofana, the eight linked portraits in Stories from The Tenants Downstairs plumb the lives of tenants in the Banneker Homes, a low-income high rise in Harlem threatened by gentrification (150,000-copy first printing). The author of five books of poetry and winner of F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story and Robert Bausch Fiction awards, combat veteran Glose tells what it was like to fight the "forever" war in All the Ruined Men. First published in Japan in 2003, popular author Yoshimoto's Dead-End Memories limns women making unusual discoveries as they find ways to heal from trauma.

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Starred review from June 20, 2022
Combat veteran Glose debuts with an emotionally charged linked collection about a squad of American soldiers trying to survive combat and its aftermath after tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. “In the Early Cocksure Days” sees a sergeant trying to resolve a quarrel between two squadmates in Iraq using improvised lances and camels. A soldier who was wounded by an IED finds that his facial disfigurement in civilian life is actually an advantage while playing high stakes poker in “Dead Man’s Hand.” In “The Dead Aren’t Allowed to Walk,” set in Virginia Beach, Va., Curtis Bradshaw sees the officer responsible for a friendly fire incident that killed his friend, and now Curtis contemplates revenge. In the best story, “Penultimate Dad,” a man tries to use his military training to make contact with his estranged teenage daughter. The closer, “Words Outlive the Tongue,” in which all the squad members’ voices are heard, offers a devastating summation of everything. Glose writes knowingly about the emotions that assault soldiers coming home from a combat zone and confronting a world that no longer makes sense to them, making for a powerful statement on the war that is waged once soldiers return home. This sterling collection stands with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

Starred review from June 1, 2022
The lives of combat soldiers in America's "forever wars." Glose adds his impressive voice to those of writers like Kevin Powers and Phil Klay who have produced powerful fiction about the experience of American soldiers fighting in the 21st-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The 18 linked stories in this debut collection follow the fortunes of six members of a single platoon of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division (in which Glose served during the 1991 Gulf War), some of whose members have experienced four tours of combat duty in four years. They gaze with an unblinking eye at the physical and emotional tolls exacted from soldiers who aren't fighting for a great cause but instead "because it was their job, each man risking everything because he loved the man next to him. Simple as that." The relentless fear that grips these men and their anxiety and nightmares only partially quelled by cocktails of prescription drugs when they return to a country that has little understanding of all they've sacrificed are recurring themes. Accounts from the war zone like "Dirge," in which one character is killed by an IED and another sustains a disfiguring facial wound, or "The Dead Aren't Allowed To Walk," in which an avoidable friendly fire incident takes the life of a key member of the platoon, reveal the omnipresence of random sudden death or catastrophic injury. In settings that range from an upscale suburban neighborhood in Princeton, New Jersey ("Sacrifices"), to a seedy bar in Pensacola, Florida ("First Drunk Night Back"), Glose exposes painful truths about the devastation wreaked on these soldiers and the families that ached for their safe returns and now struggle to relate to them when they arrive home. Throughout, he makes no effort to conceal the harsh realities of these damaged lives. A collection of painfully honest and consistently empathetic glimpses of modern American soldiers in war and peace.

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