"War porn," n. Videos, images, and narratives featuring graphic violence, often brought back from combat zones, viewed voyeuristically or for emotional gratification. Such media are often presented and circulated without context, though they may be used as evidence of war crimes.
Roy Scranton is the author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene- Reflections on the End of a Civilization, and co-editor of Fire and Forget- Short Stories from the Long War. He grew up in Oregon, dropped out of college, and spent several years wandering the American West. In 2002, he enlisted in the US Army. He served from 2002 to 2006, including a fourteen-month deployment to Iraq. After leaving the Army he earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree at the New School for Social Research, then completed his PhD in English at Princeton.
Praise for War Porn
"Forceful and unsettling."
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"One of the best and most disturbing war novels in
years."
—The Wall Street Journal
"War Porn offers a view of the American military unlike
anything else written about Iraq or Afghanistan. The book offers a
guided meditation on Iraq certain to force long overdue
introspection on how we think about the war, those who fought it
and the Americans and Iraqis it affected. Though War
Porn doesn’t set out to change anyone’s mind, it’s impossible
to read it without reconsidering how you think about Iraq and our
treatment of those who served."
—New Republic
"To read Scranton is to engage with a powerful intellect."
—Los Angeles Review of Books
"What impresses is the brutal immediacy of the writing, its
authority. Roy Scranton is a truth telling war writer."
—E.L. Doctorow, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author
of Ragtime and The March
"Roy Scranton’s searingly honest first novel is surreal,
ultra-real, and like everything he writes from the heart. This
examination of the tragedy of what happened in Iraq reaches out to
touch of all us. A brilliant literary achievement."
—Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy
"Powerful, engaging, heartrending, corrosive and unyielding."
—Joyce Carol Oates
"I have never read a book like War Porn. Roy Scranton writes
with unnerving power. There is much to admire here—the meticulous
craftsmanship, the hysterical comic passages, the way the sheer
audacity of vision is matched at every turn by the innovative skill
to carry it out—but what I'm left with at the end is difficult to
put into words. It's intense and troubling. It's what all truly
excellent literature leaves you with. A sense of something
shattering."
—Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author
of Redeployment
"War Porn is dire, savage, and brilliant, a simmering
fever-dream of a novel that's as pure and true in its vision of the
long war as anything I've read. Roy Scranton is merciless—and why
should he be anything but? War's corruption soaks through every
layer of life, and War Porn drives home that truth with
unflinching, and ultimately harrowing, honesty."
—Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
"Scranton, a US veteran with an unusually poetic ear, captures the
Beckettian banter—as well as trauma—of modern soldiering. War
Porn rewards repeated reading."
—The Spectator (UK)
"In writing War Porn, Scranton has produced a literary work
that doesn’t just describe the outrages of the war, but punches
them into the American gut. War Porn contains some of the
most significant and original writing on deployment to be found in
contemporary American literature about the Iraq War."
—The Intercept
"[Scranton] has a real aesthetic skill and is moved by a genuine
sympathy for humanity. Roy Scranton’s War
Porn expresses and helps advance the profound social anger
that is emerging amidst the rumble of a society devastated by
imperialist war."
—World Socialist Web Site
"Roy Scranton’s War Porn is not a book you read once and
put away. You read it, think about it, then read it again. Between
its covers awaits a fracture in our cultural assumptions about
war."
—Consequence Magazine
"Brilliant."
—The Rumpus
"[War Porn raises] interesting questions about the nature of
those who demand and those who supply. Scranton is a gifted
writer ."
—Electric Literature
"This book is truly unique—true in its fidelity to fact, unique in
the depth of its empathy. In prose that rises to aphoristic,
coruscating brilliance, Iraq vet Roy Scranton has painted, in
words, the equivalent of Goya's war etchings. A rare and genuine
masterpiece."
—Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, author of The
Watch and The Storyteller of Marrakesh
"A harrowing novel of the Iraq invasion and occupation, War Porn
exposes the dark heart of that war for all to see. Brilliant and
stark, War Porn is that rare book that demands to be read out of
sheer significance—a stunning accomplishment."
—Matt Gallagher, author of Youngblood
"Roy Scranton's four years of service in the U.S. Army lend his
work an undeniable authority, but it's his ability to address
multiple sides of the conflict that proves exceptional, coloring
his fiction with a rare empathy."
—The Village Voice
"[War Porn is] a different kind of Iraq War novel, for sure,
but it’s not just that. It’s an expression of Scranton’s philosophy
about telling new, different stories as a means of survival."
—The Millions
"[A] fierce debut . . . Scranton delivers a poetic sensibility and
a staccato writing style, and the result is a no-holds-barred
amalgam of plotlines that is especially tragic given all that we
now know about the wrenching mess that is today's Iraq."
—Booklist
"Scranton’s provocative debut novel lucidly captures the fractured
perspectives of war. Scranton writes with honesty and authority
about a complicated clash of weapons, politics, and culture. [War
Porn] is an unflinching, and sometimes difficult, examination
of humanity during wartime."
—Publishers Weekly
"An uncompromising look at the trauma of war."
—Library Journal
"A kaleidoscopic view of war experience . . . Scranton’s literary
skill and fierceness of vision make him a stout antagonist for
anyone who wants to take him on."
—Time Now
"Necessary."
—scene4 magazine
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