The Road Ahead

by Adrian Bonenberger

Overview

These masterfully crafted stories from writers who have served reflect the entire breadth of human emotion–loss, anger, joy, love, fear, and courage—and the evolving nature of what has become America's "Forever War." From debut writers to experienced contributors whose work has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker, this exceptional collection promises to be the definitive fictional look at the aftereffects of the Iraq and Afghan Wars and will resonate with the reader long after the final page.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681773728
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	01/10/2017
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Adrian Bonenberger is a student at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton’s MFA program for creative writing, from which he expects to graduate in May of 2016. He has a B.A. from Yale in English Literature and a M.S. in Journalism from Columbia. He joined the Army in 2005, and deployed twice to Afghanistan as an infantry officer. He has been featured in The New York Times, and has written military-themed essays for a variety of online and print publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, and Foreign Policy. He co-edits an intellectual blog, "The Wrath Bearing Tree" and volunteers with Words After War and the Yale Veterans Association. He is the author of the memoir Afghan Post.

Table of Contents

Foreword Roxana Robinson ix

Letter From The Editors xiii

Winter On The Rim Brandon Willitts 1

There's Always One Kayla M. Williams 15

Small Kill Team Alex Horton 29

Bleeder Matthew Robinson 45

Two Grenades Elliot Ackerman 53

Operation Slut Lauren Kay Halloran 69

Another Brother's Conviction Christopher Paul Wolfe 83

Funeral Conversation Nate Bethea 91

3 × 5 Thomas Gibbons-Neff 107

Little Teresa Fazio 117

The Morgan House Brandon Caro 131

Different Kinds of Infinity David F. Eisler 145

Salt Colin D. Halloran 155

Blake's Girl Eric Nelson 161

Pawns Kristen L. Rouse 179

Hadji Khan David James 199

Brown Bird Shannon Huffman Polson 219

War Party Michael Carson 233

The Church PJ Frederik 245

We Put A Man In A Tree Matthew J. Hefti 257

Into The Land Of Dogs Benjamin Busch 275

Death Of Time Maurice Emerson Decaul 299

American Fapper Adrian Bonenberger 313

The Wild Hunt Brian Castner 333

About The Contributors 343

Editorial Reviews

Most stories in The Road Ahead are told in a realistic mode, but suitable attention is paid to the surreal and disorienting elements of war and homecoming.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The writers gathered in these pages are among the finest, and the material they are working with is, by its nature, powerful and compelling. The result is stories that are by turns brutal and hilarious, dark and redemptive. Every one of them speaks to a truth we should not, cannot, turn away from.

Mary Roach

These twenty-four intimate, brutal, unusual and honest portraits show us the startling effects of war, dispelling the myth that any military solution is simple. To this diverse group of writers, women and men, I say thank you for your wrenching stories. The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is greater than we could have imagined.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

A stunning, poignant, astonishing, mournful, melancholy, brutally honest collection of stories about our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and makes this old soldier’s heart sore. They are so well written. If you want to understand our young soldiers and the world they lived in, read these stories.

Larry Heinemann

Captures the truth about war better than nonfiction. It’s possible—likely even—that these pages from a handful of writers will come to define the warrior perspective for this generation. For that reason, this book is relevant. Its stories are tragic, moving, violent, and devastating, but not always in the ways one expects. It’s enough to enlighten those most insulated from the war.

Task & Purpose

If war is eternal, its form alters with the times. These vivid stories are the up-to-date bulletins from the frontline of today. Injustices abound, meaning eludes us, until for moments, it doesn’t. These writers deliver gut-wrecking reports of humanity at the edge of despair and offer us truths about the nature of war and the men and women struggling to survive it.

Susan Minot

Savor each of the 24 distinctive tales by 24 veterans in a collection that makes you want to read more by the contributors.

Military Times

The Road Ahead more than lived up to its promise—a shockingly brilliant salvo in the next wave of literature about our perpetual wars, a diverse and strange new literature which is utterly essential if we want to understand who we are as a nation, and what this era of constant war is doing to us, to our military, and to the countries where we send our men and women to kill and die.

Phil Klay

Whatever image readers may have of veterans of the U.S. military’s seemingly never-ending engagement in Afghanistan, the ranks certainly included talented writers with sophisticated worldviews and ample amounts of self-awareness. That is reflected in nearly every one of the 24 stories collected in The Road Ahead.

San Antonio Express-News

Raw and wrenching. Castner’s memoir brings to mind Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpieceAllQuiet on the Western Front.”

Jon Krakauer [praise for the editors of 'The Road Ahead']

Unself-conscious writing paints an absorbing picture of war in the twenty-first century.

The New Yorker [praise for the editors of 'The Road Ahead']

Direct and disturbing.

Morning Edition

Unself-conscious writing paints an absorbing picture of war in the twenty-first century.

NewYorker.com

Praise for the editors ofThe Road Ahead"Painfully honest. One way to thank vets for their service is to read [Bonenberger's] book."
”

Thomas E. Ricks

Raw and wrenching. Castner’s memoir brings to mind Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpieceAllQuiet on the Western Front.”

Jon Krakauer

2016-12-07
An anthology of stories covering a literary terrain as expansive as the seemingly endless "war on terror" that spawned it. The most remarkable aspect of this collection of stories written by veterans of the "Forever War" (as the subtitle has it) is that it exists at all. In the past, there has been a lag between the experience of war and the fiction it inspired. The war on terror continues, and a number of veterans of the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq have become accomplished storytellers, as this anthology attests. The stories address pretty much every aspect of a soldier's life, from the last drink before service starts to the families left behind to the thrill and tragedy of the killing to the humanity of the enemy to the period of adjustment that finds the soldier still living in that world of combat while attempting to negotiate some sort of return to civilian normalcy. With over two dozen stories, each by a different writer, the style and quality necessarily vary. Perhaps the most audacious achievement is Matthew J. Hefti's "We Put a Man in a Tree," narrated in the first-person plural by a group of ghosts who won't let a troubled veteran's memories rest and who hound him into suicide: "We swallow families, and we eat lives, and we crush dreams, and we eat the fire that lived in the stomachs of our youth; because for those things to live, we need answers. But no one of us has the answers. We have only the questions." A female perspective is more strongly represented here than in much war fiction, with five of the stories written by women. In "Little," Teresa Fazio shows a great command of voice as she describes a tentative romance between her female narrator and an unlikely lover, neither of whom conforms to the stereotypes that soldiers themselves perpetuate. These stories provide plenty of revelation on the nature of the war and the soldiers who continue to fight it.

Kirkus Reviews