Brief Encounters With The Enemy
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Brief Encounters with the Enemy
The first short story collection from a writer who calls to mind such luminaries as Denis Johnson, George Saunders, and Nathan Englander FINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BOOKPAGE AND BOOKISH When The New Yorker published a short story by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in 2010, it marked the emergence of a startling new voice in fiction. In this astonishing book, Sayrafiezadeh conjures up a nameless American city and its unmoored denizens: a call-center employee jealous of the attention lavished on a co-worker newly returned from a foreign war; a history teacher dealing with a classroom of maliciously indifferent students; a grocery store janitor caught up in a romantic relationship with a kleptomaniac customer. These men’s struggles and fleeting triumphs—with women, with cruel bosses, with the morning commute—are transformed into storytelling that is both universally resonant and wonderfully strange. Sometimes the effect is hilarious, as when a would-be suitor tries to take his sheltered, religious date on a tunnel of love carnival ride. Other times it’s devastating, as in the unforgettable story that gives the book its title: A soldier on his last routine patrol on a deserted mountain path finally encounters “the enemy” he’s long sought a glimpse of. Upon giving the author the Whiting Writers’ Award for his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, the judges hailed his writing as “intelligent, funny, utterly unsmug and unpreening.” These fiercely original stories show their author employing his considerable gifts to offer a lens on our collective dreams and anxieties, casting them in a revelatory new light. Praise for Brief Encounters with the Enemy “With impressive guile and design, Mr. Sayrafiezadeh uses the arrival and escalation of that war as the through-line connecting each personal drama. . . . These calculated echoes work to unify [his] haunting book in a way that story collections rarely manage.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal “In his memoir, Sayrafiezadeh told the remarkable tale of a childhood steeped in doomed dogma. His stories . . . offer something more: a searing vision of his wayward homeland, delivered not in the clamoring rhetoric of a revolutionary, but in the droll monologues of young men who kill because they lack the moral imagination to do otherwise.”—Steve Almond, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) “Sayrafiezadeh’s eight interlinked stories are just as fulfilling as any novel you’re likely to read this summer.”—The Boston Globe “A tantalizing fiction debut . . . [that] menaces and mesmerizes.”—Elle “The recurring motifs include 99-cent American flags, putting in a word with the boss, idealistic Army recruitment brochures and unseasonable temperatures. Each time they recur they are more potent, and poignant. The collection is readable, and real, and hopefully a harbinger of more fiction to come from Sayrafiezadeh.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune “Funny and surprising . . . Sayrafiezadeh’s simple style can fool you into thinking that his struggling narrators are plain and unassuming. They are anything but. . . . Each story compels you to read the next, and no character escapes unscathed.”—The Daily Beast
Britain's War At Sea, 1914-1918
In Britain, memory of the First World War remains dominated by the trench warfare of the Western Front. Yet, in 1914 when the country declared war, the overwhelming expectation was that Britain’s efforts would be primarily focussed on the sea. As such, this volume is a welcome corrective to what is arguably an historical neglect of the naval aspect of the Great War. As well as reassessing Britain’s war at sea between 1914 and 1918, underlining the oft neglected contribution of the blockade of the Central Powers to the ending of the war, the book also offers a case study in ideas about military planning for ’the next war’. Questions about how next wars are thought about, planned for and conceptualised, and then how reality actually influences that thinking, have long been - and remain - key concerns for governments and military strategists. The essays in this volume show what ’realities’ there are to think about and how significant or not the change from pre-war to war was. This is important not only for historians trying to understand events in the past, but also has lessons for contemporary strategic thinkers who are responsible for planning and preparing for possible future conflict. Britain’s pre-war naval planning provides a perfect example of just how complex and uncertain that process is. Building upon and advancing recent scholarship concerning the role of the navy in the First World War, this collection brings to full light the dominance of the maritime environment, for Britain, in that war and the lessons that has for historians and military planners.
Invasion '44
A history of the pivotal World War II invasion, from its planning to the landings on the fateful day and the days that followed. In the pre-dawn darkness of 6 June 1944, the greatest armada the world has ever seen began to disembark an Allied invasion force on the beaches of France’s Normandy peninsula. Invasion’44 tells the story of that assault from the day over four years earlier, and only a few short weeks after the British disaster at Dunkirk, when a few individuals in the High Command began to turn their thoughts to the possibilities of an eventual return to the mainland, and the story continues up to the time when the Allied beach-head was firmly established on French soil. As the battle progresses, the reader is allowed to view each successive wave as it lands, follow the developing battle line inland, and keep an eye on the vital battles also developing on and beneath the seas off the Normandy peninsula and in the skies above it. Praise for Invasion ’44 “The author has provided a fine account of one of the greatest events in military history. He has carefully researched and graphically told an incredible story, producing what is the clearest and most comprehensive account on the dramatic landings.” —Firetrench