Have you read Eat the Apple? It’s a memoir by my friend Matt Young. It’s a wildly inventive memoir-ish recounting of his days as a Marine in the Iraq War. Now Matt has published a novel: End of Active Service. It’s an alarmingly intimate tour through the mind of a man who has returned from war—but the war rages on inside of him. It’s a really beautiful book about love, letting go, and starting over. I highly recommend it.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life
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My friend Matt Young's memoir, Eat the Apple, which has been called "the Iliad of the Iraq War," is on sale tomorrow. It's an amazing book that I was lucky enough to read while he was working on it. Today, the NYT proclaimed it "inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining," and NPR says it's "brilliant and barbed." I strongly recommend you read it. You will love it.
Buy a copy of my digital short story "The Tumor"! It's been called "a masterpiece."
I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of my buddy Matt Young's EAT THE APPLE: A MEMOIR.
It just got a starred review in Publisher's Weekly!
"In this bold memoir, ex-Marine Young examines how war transformed him from a confused teenager into a dangerous and damaged man. Fresh from high school and with no direction, Young walked into a Marine recruitment center in 2005 and sealed his fate. Soon he was suffering the indignities of basic training before being deployed to 'the sandbox' in Iraq, where he sweated, masturbated, shot stray dogs, and watched friends get blown up."
I went to a breast cancer support group last night. I've been cancer free for four years, but I felt like going back to a group. Sometimes I think the business of that still lingers, and I'm interested in getting rid of it. It was interesting. It makes you remember how it's so common, and everyone is different, and everyone is the same. It was raining outside. There were only six of us inside. In a way, it was a bit like a war veterans meeting: everyone with their missing pieces, and their invisible wounds, and their unloading of the past.
I came across this amazing photo by Ted Streshinsky for Corbis while doing some research.
Here's the caption:
1969: National guardsmen, called out by Governor Reagan to quell demonstrations, surround a Vietnam war protester during the People’s Park riot. The guardsmen herded protesters into a carpark with bayonets
I read Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario's memoir, It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War, and liked it very much. Is it an extraordinary work of masterful nonfiction? No. Is it the riveting account of a woman who has bigger balls than you do? Yes. There may be too much love story in this war story for man readers, but ladies looking to live boldly in a world that isn't made of pixels will be inspired by Addario's fearless approach to love and war.
“Madam,” Haleem said, “the commander’s men are worried you can’t drink your tea through your veil. They would really like for you to drink your tea.” The whispers continued, and if it weren’t for the veil, I would have had a difficult time concealing my smile. Only among Muslims is the hospitality so great that they cannot bear the notion that someone’s tea will be left untouched.
Haleem had another brilliant idea: “I know! You can stand in the corner of the room, with your back facing all of us, and lift your veil to the wall and drink your tea. Once you finish, you can replace your veil.”
And so, in a room full of some of the most vicious fighters against the United States and everything it stood for, I stood in the corner and faced the wall as I drank my tea.
"A new piece of fiction by me in the latest issue of Pank Magazine."
The latest issue of PANK Magazine is available for purchase, and I've got a new short story in it: "Dash 2." You can buy PANK 11 online here.
Buy THE TUMOR: "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."
"On these occasions, he experienced an ache of longing for its shattering finalities, its deafening cacophonies, the way it changed you into something that you had no idea you could become, that you had no other way to become, something that you could never let go, and it wasn’t you that was holding onto the war, it was the war that was holding onto you, and that it would never let you go." -- work-in-progress
From "Toward a Drone Sexuality - Part 1: Knowledge and Consent":
"We—the dronesexual, the recently defined, though we only call ourselves this name to ourselves and only ever with the deepest irony—we’re never sure whether the humming is pleasure or whether it’s a form of transmission, but we also don’t really care…There are no dronesexual support groups. We don’t have conferences. There is no established discourse around who we are and what we do. No one writes about us but us, not yet."
[The Society Pages]
I talked to one of the first female Navy fighter pilots and MIT and Duke drone professor Missy Cummings for my latest post on Forbes, "Why Women Don't Support Drone Strikes":
"This country
has engaged in targeted killings for a long time. Whether it’s the
manned aircraft, or a sniper, or some other kind of weapon. And a UAV is
just yet one more weapon in the arsenal of how we do targeted killings
in this country. So I get a little concerned when people start making
the technology the focus of the debate when, in fact, it’s not the
technology that’s driving this, it’s the policy that’s driving this. And
we need to decouple those, so that we don’t start limiting a technology
that is otherwise going to revolutionize a lagging aerospace industry."
