Books by Anthony Swofford
Jarhead : A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
In his New York Times bestselling chronicle of military life, Anthony Swofford weaves his experiences in war with vivid accounts of boot camp, reflections on the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family.
When the U.S. Marines—or “jarheads”—were sent to Saudi Arabia in 1990 for the Gulf War, Anthony Swofford was there. He lived in sand for six months; he was punished by boredom and fear; he considered suicide, pulled a gun on a fellow marine, and was targeted by both enemy and friendly fire. As engagement with the Iraqis drew near, he was forced to consider what it means to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man.
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Jarhead Movie Tie-In: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
When the marines -- or "jarheads," as they call themselves -- were sent in 1990 to Saudi Arabia to fight the Iraqis, Swofford was there, with a hundred-pound pack on his shoulders and a sniper's rifle in his hands. It was one misery upon another. He lived in sand for six months, his girlfriend back home betrayed him for a scrawny hotel clerk, he was punished by boredom and fear, he considered suicide, he pulled a gun on one of his fellow marines, and he was shot at by both Iraqis and Americans. At the end of the war, Swofford hiked for miles through a landscape of incinerated Iraqi soldiers and later was nearly killed in a booby-trapped Iraqi bunker.
Swofford weaves this experience of war with vivid accounts of boot camp, reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family. As engagement with the Iraqis draws closer, he is forced to consider what it is to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man.
Jarhead insists we remember the Americans who are wounded or killed, the fields of smoking enemy corpses left behind, and the continuing difficulty that American soldiers have reentering civilian life.
A harrowing yet inspiring portrait of a tormented consciousness struggling for inner peace, Jarhead will elbow for room on that short shelf of American war classics.
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Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
Anthony Swofford's Jarhead is the first Gulf War memoir by a frontline infantry marine, and it is a searing, unforgettable narrative.
When the marines -- or "jarheads," as they call themselves -- were sent in 1990 to Saudi Arabia to fight the Iraqis, Swofford was there, with a hundred-pound pack on his shoulders and a sniper's rifle in his hands. It was one misery upon another. He lived in sand for six months, his girlfriend back home betrayed him for a scrawny hotel clerk, he was punished by boredom and fear, he considered suicide, he pulled a gun on one of his fellow marines, and he was shot at by both Iraqis and Americans. At the end of the war, Swofford hiked for miles through a landscape of incinerated Iraqi soldiers and later was nearly killed in a booby-trapped Iraqi bunker.
Swofford weaves this experience of war with vivid accounts of boot camp (which included physical abuse by his drill instructor), reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family. As engagement with the Iraqis draws closer, he is forced to consider what it is to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man.
Unlike the real-time print and television coverage of the Gulf War, which was highly scripted by the Pentagon, Swofford's account subverts the conventional wisdom that U.S. military interventions are now merely surgical insertions of superior forces that result in few American casualties. Jarhead insists we remember the Americans who are in fact wounded or killed, the fields of smoking enemy corpses left behind, and the continuing difficulty that American soldiers have reentering civilian life.
A harrowing yet inspiring portrait of a tormented consciousness struggling for inner peace, Jarhead will elbow for room on that short shelf of American war classics that includes Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and be admired not only for the raw beauty of its prose but also for the depth of its pained heart.
Copies
No copies available.
Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
In his New York Times bestselling chronicle of military life, Anthony Swofford weaves his experiences in war with vivid accounts of boot camp, reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family.
When the U.S. Marines -- or "jarheads" -- were sent to Saudi Arabia in 1990 for the first Gulf War, Anthony Swofford was there. He lived in sand for six months; he was punished by boredom and fear; he considered suicide, pulled a gun on a fellow marine, and was targeted by both enemy and friendly fire. As engagement with the Iraqis drew near, he was forced to consider what it means to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man.
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Exit A: A Novel
Harboring a secret love for a general's precocious daughter while coming of age at an Air Force base in 1989 Japan, young Severin Boxx is swept up in the motherless girl's subversive infatuation with the Japanese underground. A first novel by the author of Jarhead. 200,000 first printing.
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Exit A: A Novel
Anthony Swofford follows his international best-seller Jarhead with an unforgettable first novel -- a powerful story about a youth spent on a U.S. air base in Japan and the gritty neon streets just outside it, where the Japanese underworld lurks and a rebellious young girl finds herself in great danger........
Seventeen-year-old Severin Boxx, an earnest, muscular high-school-football star, lives on an American air force base on the outskirts of Tokyo. Severin is mad for Virginia Kindwall, the base general's daughter, who is a hafu -- half American and half Japanese. Beautiful, smart, and utterly defiant of her father, Virginia has become a petty criminal in the Japanese underground.
Severin is soon caught up in Virginia's world, and together they drift through the mad neon landscape outside the walls of the base, near the busy Haijima rail station, a place of movement, anonymity, and sudden disappearance. Exit A is one of its many shadowy doorways. Severin and Virginia fall into trouble way over their heads and are soon subjected to the enormous, unforgiving tensions between America and Japan. Years later, Severin and Virginia remain lost to each other, until an emotionally frayed, thirty- something Severin embarks on a quest to find Virginia -- and the part of himself taken from him when his boyhood abruptly ended.
Darkly irreverent, frankly erotic, at once suspenseful and emotionally overwhelming, Swofford's Exit A builds inexorably toward a climax as it audaciously plumbs the legacies of war, the wish for redemption, and the danger of love..........
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Tin House: Winter Reading
by Stephen Elliott, Ron Carlson, Anthony Swofford, Kate Christensen, Stuart Dybek, Jim Shepard, Christopher Sorrentino, Antony Doerr, Tara Ison, Shawn Vestal
Tin House: Winter Reading is a beautifully designed periodical featuring the best writers of our time alongside a new generation of talent who are poised to become the most important voices of the future. Content includes short stories, profiles, author interviews, poetry, essays; and unique departments such as "Lost & Found," reviews of overlooked or underated books; and "Blithe Spirits" and "Readable Feast," which present tales and recipes for drinks and food in a literary way.
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Tin House: Winter Reading
by Stephen Elliott, Ron Carlson, Anthony Swofford, Kate Christensen, Stuart Dybek, Jim Shepard, Christopher Sorrentino, Antony Doerr, Tara Ison, Shawn Vestal
Equally acclaimed for its beautiful design and its cutting-edge content, each issue of Tin House features a memorable mix of work by renowned contemporary writers alongside a new generation of talent poised to become important voices of the future. This issue features a wide variety of content: short stories, profiles, author interviews, poetry, essays, along with unique departments such as "Lost & Found," reviews of overlooked or underrated books; and "Blithe Spirits" and "Readable Feast," which present tales and recipes for drinks and food in a literary way. Readers are encouraged to snuggle up with a warm blanket and a bright light, as this winter reading issue takes them down the dark, abandoned corridors of the human condition. Authors Christopher Sorrentino and Benjamin Nugent present fiction both comic and dramatic, while Kate Christensen and Katie Crouch put on readable feasts in the celebrated Tin House tradition.
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Food and Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast
by Francine Prose, Steve Almond, Lydia Davis, Elissa Schappell, Anthony Swofford, Stuart Dybek, Grace Paley
Editors have assembled a delicious collection of food and drink writing that originally appeared in Tin House magazine. Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast celebrates seven years of the dazzling writing and delicious recipes of Tin House magazine’s Readable Feast and Blithe Spirits departments. Literature and gastronomy converge in an idiosyncratic survey of everything from lotus fruit, elk, and absinthe to bread, eggs, and brandy Old-Fashioneds. Ranging from the humorous to the lyrical, the historic to the personal, and humble to haute cuisine, this elegant collection includes pieces by writers such as Steve Almond, Lan Samantha Chang, Lydia Davis, Chris Offutt, Grace Paley, Francine Prose, Elissa Schappell, and Michelle Wildgen.
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Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir
The publication of Jarhead launched a new career for Anthony Swofford, earning him accolades for its gritty and unexpected portraits of the soldiers who fought in the Gulf War. It spawned a Hollywood movie. It made Swofford famous and wealthy. It also nearly killed him.
Now with the same unremitting intensity he brought to his first memoir, Swofford describes his search for identity, meaning, and a reconciliation with his dying father in the years after he returned from serving as a sniper in the Marines. Adjusting to life after war, he watched his older brother succumb to cancer and his first marriage disintegrate, leading him to pursue a lifestyle in Manhattan that brought him to the brink of collapse. Consumed by drugs, drinking, expensive cars, and women, Swofford lost almost everything and everyone that mattered to him.
When a son is in trouble he hopes to turn to his greatest source of wisdom and support: his father. But Swofford and his father didn't exactly have that kind of relationship. The key, he realized, was to confront the man-a philandering, once hard-drinking, now terminally ill Vietnam vet he had struggled hard to understand and even harder to love. The two stubborn, strong-willed war vets embarked on a series of RV trips that quickly became a kind of reckoning in which Swofford took his father to task for a lifetime of infidelities and abuse. For many years Swofford had considered combat the decisive test of a man's greatness. With the understanding that came from these trips and the fateful encounter that took him to a like-minded woman named Christa, Swofford began to understand that becoming a father himself might be the ultimate measure of his life.
Elegantly weaving his family's past with his own present-nights of excess and sexual conquest, visits with injured war veterans, and a near-fatal car crash-Swofford casts a courageous, insistent eye on both his father and himself in order to make sense of what his military service meant, and to decide, after nearly ending it, what his life can and should become as a man, a veteran, and a father.
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