APRIL 2014 - AudioFile
Craig Klein perfectly narrates these stories of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hitting their exact tone and pacing. The soldier’s life in a combat zone is one of boredom, military bureaucracy, violence, fear, exhilaration, and a host of other emotions. Klay, who as an adjutant in the Marines, had the perfect vantage point to see all sides of the warrior’s life, splendidly captures the experience of war. Klein’s voice is well matched to the text of each story—each told in the first person by a different observer. From the soldier returning home to the contractor with the ridiculous scheme to meet an equally ridiculous State Department goal and the chaplain who endures a crisis of faith, Klein reads each story as though he were the observer himself. M.T.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Dexter Filkins
Klay succeeds brilliantly, capturing 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 for 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 - Michiko Kakutani
In Redeployment, his searing debut collection of short stories, Phil Klay…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; it achieves through fiction something very similar to what David Finkel's 2009 nonfiction book The Good Soldiers did through tough but empathetic reporting.
Publishers Weekly
★ 01/06/2014
Klay’s title story, a moving homage to soldiers of war who must return home to attempt a normal life, made a splash when it was first published in Granta. This debut collection of a dozen stories resonates with themes of battle and images of residual battlefield pain and psychological trauma. This is especially evident in heart-wrenching stories like “Bodies,” in which a soldier buffers his grisly war stories in order not to have to truly share the horror of his tour in Iraq. Alternately, some stories are lighter and offer glimmers of humanity against Klay’s bleak landscape of combat, as in “Money as a Weapons System,” which finds a Foreign Service Officer charged with improving the civil affairs of Iraqi citizens by offering them baseball lessons. 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. Written in clipped sentences capturing the brutality of conflict, the specter of death permeates each story, from the corpse-eating dogs in the title story to Sergeant Deetz in “Ten Kliks South,” who snickers at his troop’s body count of insurgents. 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. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Dexter Filkins, The New York Times Book 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.”
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times:
“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."
George Packer, The New Yorker:
“The best literary work thus far written by a veteran of America’s recent wars.... Klay’s fiction peels back every pretty falsehood and self-delusion in the encounter between veterans and the people for whom they supposedly fought.”
Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine:
“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.”
The Wall Street Journal:
“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.”
Entertainment Weekly:
“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.”
San Francisco Chronicle:
“Klay's closely observed debut collection of stories…makes a fine contribution….Klay establishes an impressive authority over his subject, which he maintains throughout the book in a clipped and jargon-laden prose.”
Portland Oregonian:
“One of the best debuts of the year.”
Men’s Journal:
“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.”
The Daily Beast:
“Phil Klay has written brilliant, true, and winning fiction on the Iraq War.”
Grantland:
“Perhaps the most vital short story collection to emerge in the past few years….Redeployment falls somewhere between the in-the-trenches lyricism of Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds and the bold satire of Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. And yet, it feels more urgent than both…. Redeployment is urgent, smart, and darkly comic.”
Publishers Weekly (starred):
"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."
Kirkus Reviews (starred):
“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.”
Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal:
“Important reading; pay attention.”
Lawrence Rungren, Library Journal:
"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."
Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk:
"If you want to know the real cost of war for those who do the fighting, read Redeployment. These stories say it all, with an eloquence and rare humanity that will simultaneously break your heart and give you reasons to hope."
Nathan Englander, author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank:
"As we try to understand the human costs of yet another foreign conflict, Phil Klay brings us the stories of the American combatants, told in a distinct, new, and powerful voice."
Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!:
"Redeployment is a stunning, upsetting, urgently necessary book about the impact of the Iraq war on both soldiers and civilians. Klay's writing is searing and powerful, unsparing of its characters and its readers, art made from a soldier's fearless commitment to confront those losses that can't be tallied in statistics. 'Be honest with me,' a college student asks a returning veteran in one story, and Phil Klay's answer is a challenge of its own: these stories demand and deserve our attention.
Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead:
"Phil Klay's stories are tightly wound psychological thrillers. The global wars of our last decade weave in and out of these affecting tales about characters who sound and feel like your neighbors. Klay comes to us through Leo Tolstoy, Ray Carver, and Ann Beattie. It's a thrill to read a young writer so brilliantly parsing the complexities and vagaries of war. That he does so with surgical precision and artful zest makes this a must-read."
Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin:
"When the history of these times are finally shaken out, and the shredders have all been turned off, we will turn to writers like Phil Klay to finally understand the true nature of who we were, and where we have been, and where we are still going. He slips himself in under the skin of the war with a muscular language and an agile heart and a fair amount of complicated doubt. Redeployment will be one of the great story collections of recent times. Phil Klay is a writer of our times. I can't wait to see what he does next."
Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone:
“To most, the war in Iraq is a finished chapter in history. Not so to the Marines, family members, and State Department employees in Phil Klay's electrifying debut collection, Redeployment. Thanks to these provocative and haunting stories, the war will also become viscerally real to readers. Phil Klay is a powerful new voice and Redeployment stands tall with the best war writing of this decade.”
Patrick McGrath, author of Trauma:
"Redeployment is fiction of a very high order. These are war stories, written with passion and urgency and consummate writerly skill. There's a clarity here that's lacerating in its precision and exhiliration in its effect."
Lea Carpenter, author of Eleven Days:
"These stories are surgically precise strikes to the heart; you can't read them without recalling other classic takes on war and loss—Conrad, Herr, Hemingway. Klay maps the cast of our recent Middle East conflicts and illuminates its literal, and philosophical center: human casualty."
Roxana Robinson, author of Sparta:
“These are gorgeous stories—fierce, intelligent and heartbreaking. Phil Klay, a former Marine, brings us both the news from Iraq and the news from back home. His writing is bold and sure, and full of all sorts of authority—literary, military and just plain human. This is news we need to hear, from a new writer we need to know about.”
APRIL 2014 - AudioFile
Craig Klein perfectly narrates these stories of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hitting their exact tone and pacing. The soldier’s life in a combat zone is one of boredom, military bureaucracy, violence, fear, exhilaration, and a host of other emotions. Klay, who as an adjutant in the Marines, had the perfect vantage point to see all sides of the warrior’s life, splendidly captures the experience of war. Klein’s voice is well matched to the text of each story—each told in the first person by a different observer. From the soldier returning home to the contractor with the ridiculous scheme to meet an equally ridiculous State Department goal and the chaplain who endures a crisis of faith, Klein reads each story as though he were the observer himself. M.T.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2013-12-22
A sharp set of stories, the author's debut, about U.S. soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and their aftermaths, with violence and gallows humor dealt out in equal measure. Klay is a Marine veteran who served in Iraq, and the 12 stories reveal a deep understanding of the tedium, chaos and bloodshed of war, as well as the emotional disorientation that comes with returning home from it. But in the spirit of the best nonfiction writing about recent U.S. war vets (David Finkel's Thank You For Your Service, for example), Klay eschews simple redemptive or tragic narrative arcs. The discomfiting "Bodies" is narrated by a Mortuary Affairs officer whose treatment of women back home is almost as equally coldhearted as he had to be when collecting remains, while "Prayer in the Furnace" is told from the perspective of a chaplain forced to confront a battalion that's been bullied into a hyperviolent posture. Klay favors a clipped, dialogue-heavy style, and he's skilled enough to use it for comic as well as dramatic effect. "OIF," for instance, is a vignette that riffs on the military's alphabet soup of acronyms and how they emotionally paper over war's toll. ("And even though J-15 left his legs behind, at least he got CASEVAC'd to the SSTP and died on the table.") The finest story in the collection, "Money as a Weapons System," follows a Foreign Service Officer tasked with helping with reconstruction efforts in Iraq. His grand ambition to reopen a water treatment plant is slowly undone by incompetence, internecine squabbling and a congressman's buddy who thinks there's no problem in Iraq that teaching kids baseball won't fix; Klay's grasp of bureaucracy and bitter irony here rivals Joseph Heller and George Orwell. The narrators sound oddly similar throughout the book, as if the military snapped everybody into one world-wise voice. But it does make the book feel unusually cohesive for a debut collection. A no-nonsense and informed reckoning with combat.
