Redeployment (short story collection)
[2] Klay has said that before and during his service in Iraq he did not have a "clear sense" that he was going to write about war, but that when he shared his plan to enter the military upon graduation, his Dartmouth College teacher and mentor, the American poet Tom Sleigh:[3] "...made sure that before I went I'd read Tolstoy, Hemingway, Isaac Babel and David Jones.Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest and Edward P. Jones's The Known World and Nathan Englander's short stories, for example, were all very helpful at different points for different stories.Redeployment was published in March 2014."[10] In The Guardian, Edward Docx wrote:[11] [I]t is definitely in the combined effect of the stories that Redeployment garners its power and earns the comparisons to Tim O'Brien's writing on Vietnam that it has been getting in America.By the end, he had convincingly inhabited more than a dozen different voices and I felt I had learned more about Iraq than in any documentary or factual account.Writing in the Daily Beast, Brian Castner described the book "a clinic in the profanities of war".If obscenity scrapes just the skin then through the narrative arc of tragedy and suffering Klay has managed to dig down to the organs.On November 19, Redeployment received the 2014 National Book Award for fiction.[13] The judges described it as a "brutal, piercing sometimes darkly funny collection" that "stakes Klay's claim for consideration as the quintessential storyteller of America's Iraq conflict.The Chautauqua Prize is awarded annually to commemorate a book of fiction or literary/narrative nonfiction that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and honors the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts.