The following podcast contains explicit language.

Welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club's discussion of the redeployment by Phil Clay.

I'm Dan Coise. I'm the editor of the Slate Bookerview, and I'm here in Slate's DC Recording Studio.

Joining me here is Hanna Rosen, a writer for the Slate in the Atlantic.

Hi, Hannah.

Hi, Dan.

And joining us from Snowy Boston is Slate Cultural Critic, Megan O'Rourke. Hey, Megan. Hey, Dan. As always with the audiobook club, if you are not a person who likes to be spoiled about books, if you don't want to know what's going to happen in a book before you think about it or read about it or listen about it, please put us on pause and go read, redeployment and come back because we will be spoiling the stuff that happens in the various

stories in this collection.

Redeployment is Phil Clay's National Book Award winning debut collection of stories, all of them

about military men in Iraq and back home.

Today I want to talk about how Clay writes about the modern, all-professional army.

I want to talk about how these stories fit in the tradition of war fiction, but I thought we

might start today and talking about the actual structure of the book, the way the book

conceives of being a collection. These stories are all

basically about one topic, right? The big topic, the big story of these stories is the Iraq War

and its aftermath. But it deals with this topic by giving us a wide array of kinds of stories

and a lot of different kinds of voices about a lot of different

jobs. We get grunts and we get commanders and we get a chaplain and we get an adjutant and we

get a foreign service officer and a guy in corpse disposal and a whole artillery team.

There's no recurring characters really that I could see and it's an attempt to sort of give us a whole picture of the war through a bunch of different prisms. How did this variety of voices affect your guys reading? Did you guys feel like that was a satisfying way to make a collection? Hannah, why don't you start? I already disagree with your description of it. Awesome. It's the wide variety of voices.

I mean, one thing that happened to me in reading this book is I had a really hard time distinguishing the voices.

So what you just listed would a series of jobs.

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