On Veteran’s Day, November 11 at 8PM: Brooklyn Reading Works at the Old Stone House presents Writing War: Fiction and Memoir by Veterans of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan with Matt Gallagher, author of Kaboom, Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War, Juri Jurjevics, Roy Scranton, Philip Klay and Jacob Siegel.
The Old Stone House, the site of the Battle of Brooklyn, one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolutionary War, is an appropriate setting for this literary event, which will highlight writing by those who know war first hand. All of these writers have transformed their experience of the violence, the chaos, the devastation, pain, fear and even hilarity of war—in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan—into honest and searing prose. As Roy Scranton writes in an essay published in the New York Times that chronicles his path from youth to soldier to civilian writer in New York City “The prior four years of my life hung over my days like the eerie and unshakable tingle of a half-remembered dream — “my time in the Army” — and the sense of chronic disconnection was getting to me. I walked between two worlds: the New York around me and the Army in my head.”
