This was first recommended to me by Caroline Paul (@carowriter), an incredible writer in her own right, who was also one of the first female firefighters in San Francisco. This is one of her favorite books because, as she said, “A lot of [O’Brien’s] writing, at least initially, was about Vietnam in thinly veiled autobiographical form, but fiction. That book actually got me back to reading. When you go to college, reading gets kicked out of you a little bit. You have to read all of these things, and I didn’t [start reading again] until my friend Eric, a whitewater rafter with me, handed me this book.” Be forewarned that it contains beautiful prose and graphic violence in equal measure.
A classic, life-changing meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling, with more than two-million copies in print
Depicting the men of Alpha Company—Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three—the stories in The Things They Carried opened our eyes to the nature of war in a way we will never forget. It is taught everywhere, from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing, and in the decades since its publication it has never failed to challenge our perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, and courage, longing, and fear.
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The Things They Carried
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