A talk about why Phil Klay was driven to write a book about the Iraq war, and how that cashed out not simply in terms of the choice of subject matter, but also in terms of what we might think of as more purely aesthetic choices—the choice of first-person perspectives, the structure of the different narrators, the decision to incorporate military jargon to the point of risking incomprehension, and so on.
Phil Klay is the author of the short story collection Redeployment, which won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction. A graduate of the Hunter College MFA program, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and the Brookings Institution's Brookings Essay Series.