The Vintage Book of War Stories.Sebastian Faulks

Description:
In this unique and compelling anthology, Sebastian Faulks has collected the best fiction about war in the 20th century. Ranging from the First World War to the Gulf War, these stories depict a soldier's experience from call-up, battle and comradeship, to leave, hospital and trauma in later life. Truly international in scope, this anthology includes stories by Erich Maria Remarque and Pat Barker, Isaac Babel and Ernest Hemingway, Heinrich Boll and Norman Mailer, J G ballard and Tim O'Brien, Julian Barnes and Louis de Bernieres. Together, they form a powerful and moving evocation of the horrors of war.

Review:
Lenin once commented that while 'you may not be interested in war, war is certainly interested in you', and these pieces, all extracts from longer works, reinforce that impression of conflict's inevitability, mundanity, horror and its hunger for human life. Embraced by this collection are writers from Germany, Britain, Japan, the USA and Vietnam, and the war is dealt with from a variety of viewpoints: Shusaku Endo's Japanese doctor carries out vivsections on US prisoners of war while Bao Ninh's hero is part of a Vietnamese team that collects and buries corpses after the war has ended, and Louis Begley tells of a Jewish boy living under an assumed Polish identity in Nazi-occupied Poland. Faulks is fond of saying that there has never been such a century for killing as the 20th, and it is thus scarcely surprising that the writing here does not predate World War I: bound by the last 90 years, this is nevertheless a comprehensive selection which demonstrates the broad techniques with which writers expose the many faces of war. (Kirkus UK)

Added by the Seller on Thu 17 Feb 2011 21:11:08 (GMT)