Numbers don’t lie, they say. 2 + 2 = 4. No matter how you rearrange it; no matter how you solve it. Turn it into subt…
Nonfiction
New Nonfiction by M.C. Armstrong: “Murder Most Foul: The Role of Lyndon Johnson in the Murder of John F. Kennedy”
What is the truth, and where did it go? Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know. “Shut your mouth, ”…
Peter Molin’s Strike Through the Mask!: “So Say We All and the Veterans Writing Workshop”
Justin Hudnall, the founder and director of the San Diego-based performative writing-and-reading collective So Say We…
New Nonfiction from Larry Abbott: Review of Joy Damiani’s “If You Ain’t Cheatin’, You Ain’t Tryin'”
Joy Damiani: If You Ain’t Cheatin’, You Ain’t Tryin’ (and other lessons I learned in the Army) Available on Amazon i…
New Nonfiction from Thomas Donovan: “After the War”
There was a heavy snowfall that February night in 1946. A six-year-old boy watched from his bedroom window as the big…
Peter Molin’s Strike Through the Mask!: A Review of Andrew Bacevich’s “Paths of Dissent”
What did you do if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and believed the wars you volunteered to fight were uneth…
New Nonfiction from Antoinette Constable: “A Hundred Roses for Olga Herzen”
To some people outside our circle, Charles Rist was seen as a saintly hero. Charles Rist, our grandfather, was a famo…
New Nonfiction from Patrick Hicks: “A Woman’s Place”
Ravensbrück did not fall from the sky. It was planned. It was built. It was managed. The only all-female concentratio…
Peter Molin’s Strike Through the Mask!—Elliot Ackerman’s “The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan” and Jamil Jan Kochai’s “Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories”
It’s a commonplace that America largely ignored the long war in Afghanistan while it was being fought. Now, aft…
New Nonfiction from Lauren Kay Johnson: “Inheritance of War” an Excerpt from The Fine Art of Camouflage
I swore I would never become a soldier like my mother. She called it a blip, a few months out of an otherwise enjoyab…
New Nonfiction from Joan Stack Kovach: “What He Wore”
He was always a very sharp dresser. Firstborn child, he toddled around in a merino wool coat from Lord&Taylor and…
New Nonfiction from J. Malcolm Garcia: “Othello Avenue”
In the cold autumn dawn shadows blanket Othello Avenue, the parked cars and vans little more than gauzy, damp lumps, …
New Nonfiction from MaxieJane Frazier: “A Military Liberal Education”
The scored green vinyl seat inside an Air Force Bluebird bus at the base of the “Bring Me Men” ramp at the U.S. Air F…
New Nonfiction: “One Woman’s History of Sexual Abuse in Prison” by Patty Prewitt
Missouri inmate Patty Prewitt has been in prison for almost 40 years. She is serving a life sentence for the murder o…
New Nonfiction: “A Bridge” by Kent Jacobson
Take me to the alley Take me to the afflicted ones Take me to the lonely ones that Somehow lost their way …
New Nonfiction by Bettina Rolyn: “Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?”
I have come to do a writing residency at the Museum of Loss and Renewal in Molise, southern Italy, in a remote mounta…
New Fiction from Thomas Mixon: “Strong Feelings of Sympathy and Horror”
A little stoned, on the screen porch facing the invisible grunts of New Hampshire spring peepers. Something night, so…
New Nonfiction: Review of Christopher Lyke’s “The Chicago East India Company”
Gravitational lensing – as half-remembered from an article I read years ago, as confirmed courtesy of a recent …
New Nonfiction from Patricia Contaxis: “Luminous Things”
It is late October and the season is turning. The morning chill is not the surface cool of fog, the chill you feel in…
New Nonfiction: “Survivor’s Paradox” by Chris Oliver
When I first saw the photo of David Spicer in a 2009 Army Times, I was excited to recognize my friend there on the pa…
New Nonfiction from Leah McNaughton Lederman: “Man of Steel”
There’s a solid history of stupid when it comes to fireworks at our family cabin at the corner of Pennsylvania…
New Nonfiction from Sari Fordham: “Mending”
Our pre-WWII house has two small bedrooms, a tiny closet in each. I feel virtuous when I fit my clothing into one, le…
New Nonfiction from Fabrizia Faustinella: “Infinitesimal Possibilities”
You are in the stairwell, standing with a few of your fellow medical students, waiting for that door in the basement …
New Nonfiction by Carol Ann Wilson: “Live Oaks”
‘Tis a fearful thing to love What death can touch. To love, to hope, to dream, and oh, to lose . . . by Judah …
New Review from MaxieJane Frazier: “Mapping Fault Lines in Kate Schifani’s Cartography”
Kate Schifani’s memoir, Cartography, maps faulty practices and question of fault over her year serving in Iraq as an …
New nonfiction from Rebecca Rolland: “A Letter to My Ten-Year-Old Daughter
“Something terrible happened today.” “At my school?” you asked. “No,” I replied. …
New Nonfiction from Dr. Anthony Gomes: “The Gun Culture in America: Will There be a Light at the End of the Tunnel?”
To fathom the Gun Culture and gun-related violence in the US, it is important to understand The Second Amendment (Ame…
New Nonfiction from Ulf Pike: “Tone Deaf”
With a slightly youthful blurring of reality, sandhill cranes resemble pterodactyls in flight. Each year when they re…
Interview with Tom Keating, Author of ‘Yesterday’s Soldier’
Andria Williams for The Wrath-Bearing Tree: I was honored to read Tom Keating’s memoir, ‘Yesterday’…
New Review from Brian Castner: Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Bomber Mafia”
Why did Malcolm Gladwell write a World War II book? The bombing campaign over Europe and Japan is hardly his typical …
New Nonfiction from Rob Bokkon: “The Last of the Gonzo Boys: P.J. O’Rourke, War, and the Evolution of a Political Mind”
“We hear the Iraqi army is systematically blowing up buildings in downtown Kuwait City. If the architecture in Kuwait…
New Nonfiction: “Underground” by Mark Hummel
In my childhood, television was a great unifier, for there existed a limited choice of three television networks, dis…
New Nonfiction from J.G.P. MacAdam: “Was His Name Mohammed Hassan?”
I don’t want to keep going back there. I’m damn near forty years old; too broke and tubby to deploy anymore. It’s my …
New Nonfiction from Karl Meade: “Knee-Capped”
We all live in a kind of delirium: as if we have control of our lives, while we know damn well something is coming. W…
New Nonfiction from Jon Imparato: “You Had Me at Afghanistan”
“I was lying in a burned‐out basement with the full moon in my eyes. I was hoping for replacement when the sun burst …
Book Review: Lauren Hough’s ‘Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing’ and Sari Fordham’s ‘Wait for God to Notice’
“I was like an inept spy pretending to be American based on movies I’d watched and books I’d read.” — Lauren Ho…
New Nonfiction from M.C. Armstrong: “J.F.K. Revisited: Through the Looking-Glass”
I write this review of Oliver Stone’s new film during the most bizarre month in America since the January of the Capi…
Interview with Navy Veteran and Artist Skip Rohde, by Larry Abbott
Skip Rohde was an officer in the Navy for twenty-two years, with four submarine deployments and service in Desert Shi…
Book Review: David Ervin on Jerad Alexander’s ‘VOLUNTEERS: GROWING UP IN THE FOREVER WAR’
As the United States marks the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the Global War on Terror as well as an ugly …
New Nonfiction from Bettina Rolyn: “Adjustment Disorder”
For thirteen years, I stored my boxes of army documents and medical records in various basements, closets, and attics…
New Fiction from Jon Imparato: “You Had Me at Afghanistan”
“I was lying in a burned‐out basement with the full moon in my eyes. I was hoping for replacement when the sun burst …
New Interview from Larry Abbott: Suzanne Rancourt on Poetry, Myth, Nature, Indigenous Life
Suzanne Rancourt’s new book of poems, Old Stones, New Roads (2021) builds on the work of her two previous books (Bill…
New Nonfiction from J. Malcolm Garcia: “Alabama Village”
(Editor’s Note: Some names have been changed for privacy.) The three white, rectangular buildings of Light of t…
New Review from M.C. Armstrong: Diane Lefer’s ‘Out of Place’
I can’t stop thinking about Dawit Tesfaye, an FBI agent in Diane Lefer’s excellent new novel, Out of Place. Shortly a…
New Nonfiction from Rob Bokkon: “Betrayal at Blair Mountain”
There were 10,000 of them. Boys fresh back from the war in France, middle-aged guys who fought in Cuba with TR, and o…
New Nonfiction by John Darcy: “Hypothermia”
The email takes me to a link that takes me to an article displaying two mugshots. The mugshots take me back to winter…
“The ‘Office Space’ of War Novels”: Susanne Aspley Interviews Brett Allen, Author of ‘Kilroy Was Here’
I first heard about Brett Allen’s debut novel, ’Kilroy Was Here’, by tweet from Matt Gallagher (@MattGallagher0), aut…
Larry Abbott on Warrior Songs, Vol. Three: “The Last Thing We Ever Do: Vietnam Veterans Speak Truth”
Warrior Songs is a series of albums created under the direction of Iraq War veteran Jason Moon, profiled here in Wrat…
New Nonfiction from Philip Alcabes: “Peppina”
1. A Child A neglected box in the back of my closet contains a contain a collection of items from my father’s apartme…
New Review from Matthew Komatsu: Adin Dobkin’s ‘Sprinting Through No-Man’s Land’
I cannot separate my early memories of war from those of cycling. I’d just begun to cycle competitively — as a lieute…