How do we tell twenty-first-century war stories when the wars seem to go on forever?
In the post-2011 surge of war stories published in America and Iraq, the defining characteristic is the depiction of combat violence that crosses borders, overtakes civilian spaces, and disrupts chronology. In The War Comes with You: Enduring War in Life, Fiction, and Fantasy, Stacey Peebles picks up where her groundbreaking first book, Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq, left off. Via careful readings of fiction, memoir, and poetry by writers such as Ben Fountain, Siobhan Fallon, Brian Turner, and Hassan Blasim, as well as recent superhero and Star Wars films, Peebles argues that, in the face of real and fantasy "forever wars," things fall apart. Language, identities, bodies, and even the stories themselves fragment. These narratives suggest that people need not accept incoherence and there is a range of meaningful responses to the experience of everywhere, all-the-time war. Peebles illustrates what to do, that is, when war comes with you.
Stacey Peebles is H. W. Stodghill, Jr. and Adele H. Stodghill Professor of English and Film Studies at Centre College. She is the author of Welcome to the Suck and Cormac McCarthy and Performance as well as editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal.
