
War

The author on writing about the swell before a war, factual inaccuracy as surrealism, and taking a jab at our own heedlessness.

The poet on her new collection of documentary poetry, military simulation zones, and how Americans are regularly ensconced in the diorama of war.

The writer on kill bro poems, cyborg transformations as erotic experiences, and implicating the self.

You might be an heir to the throne,
but I’ve abolished the monarchy
before the sun comes out
and washes away the DayGlo.
In the spring of 2015, An-My Lê was invited by film director Gary Ross to photograph on the set of Free State of Jones, his period war film inspired by the life of Newton Knight, a Mississippi farmer and Southern Unionist who led an armed revolt against the Confederacy in 1864.
“It’s really important that my colleagues, the filmmakers from all Yugoslav countries, turn their cameras toward themselves, so as to dissect and question what really constitutes our recent history.”

How might one delineate “damage” given the wider effects of war on society and its citizenry? Solmaz Sharif’s debut book of poems inquires through a powerful collection of verse that integrates the Defense Dictionary lexicon.

The crisply constructed short stories for which David Means has become renowned are high and tight. His new—and first—novel, Hystopia, is something shaggier, departing, in its theoretical approach, from the New Yorker School of Fiction for the emerging field of narrative medicine, in which testimonies of trauma are inherently wooly and chaotic rather than refined and concise.

“People love to underrate plot, because it makes them sound like they’re beyond it, like plot is best left to Danielle Steele.“
