Memorial Days

"Spanning half a century, these stories move backwards and forwards through time and space from wartime Vietnam to Vietnam and America today, revealing as they do the ways that old war and the new ones in the Middle East continue to rip at the soul of this country. . . . Karlin is the most neglected and overlooked writer of my generation. I dearly hope this collection will bring him some of the recognition he and his work so richly deserve."

—W. D. Ehrhart, author of From the Bark of the Daphne Tree

"With aching clarity, Memorial Days lets us see the ways wars have changed Vietnamese and Americans as well as our two countries. Wayne Karlin, as a firsthand witness of wars and a peace advocate, makes sure that the lessons we can learn from our past are never forgotten. This short story collection is a powerful call for world peace, a torch shining our way toward empathy, compassion, hope, and healing."

—Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, internationally best-selling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child

“This is one collection I’ve found endearing because as a reader I felt the pains of those in it, their nostalgia, their bubbling violence as a byproduct of the corrupted memories. I often wonder: if I were a soldier, could I keep my conscience at bay when I pulled the trigger? When I came home from the war, would the past keep haunting the present, the trauma of war never going away? Memorial Days is valuable to those like us who did not fight in the war(s), and yet it grants a reprieve to those who did and are plagued by their memories.”

—Khanh Ha, author of Her: The Flame Tree

“For Wayne Karlin, every day is Memorial Day. An accomplished novelist, Karlin now brings us this extraordinary collection of short stories, spanning almost fifty years. As a Vietnam veteran writer, he remembers that war and the wars to follow, especially in Iraq, as a new generation of veterans returns. Haunted, he haunts us, a witness who transcends his own experience through the power of imagination. You will not read a more harrowing story this year than “The War on Terror,” dealing not only with the Iraq War but the war at home, the military mentality and the military hardware that increasingly dominate policing in this country. He evokes landscapes from Vietnam to Iraq to Southern Maryland, and the ghosts, living and dead, that wander those landscapes, with great clarity of voice and vision. Wayne Karlin has been telling the truth about war and what Wilfred Owen called “the pity of war” for half a century. The least the rest of us could do is listen.”

—Martín Espada, winner of the National Book Award for Floaters