Veterans Crisis Hotline
160 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Hardcover
Release Date:05 Oct 2018
ISBN:9781625343680
The twelve stories of Veterans Crisis Hotline offer a meditation on the relationship between war and righteousness and consider the impossible distance between who men are and who they want to be. A veteran working at the hotline listens to the stories men tell when they need someone to hear their voices, when they need to access a language for their pain. Two men search for the head of a decapitated Iraqi civilian so that they might absolve themselves of the atrocities of war, a Marine hunts for the man who raped his girlfriend, and a teenage son replaces his dead father on the battlefield. With a quick wit and offbeat humor, Jon Chopan takes us from the banks of the Euphrates to the bars and VFW halls of the Rust Belt, providing insight into the Iraq War and its enduring impact on those who volunteered to fight in it.
These twelve stories, each narrated by a different veteran of the Iraq war, divide evenly between the often near-hallucinatory events of that war and the accounts of life back home in its aftermath. Sometimes sad, sometimes horrifying, often hilarious—occasionally all three simultaneously—each story bears down on moments of such searing honesty that it lingers in the reader's memory as urgently as it lives on the page. This is an unsparing, vital, and completely engaging work of art.'—Sue Miller, author of The Arsonist
'Jon Chopan's Veterans Crisis Hotline is a stark reminder of what happens to some soldiers after they return from war . . . This book, his second collection of short stories, won the 2017 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Its spare but evocative prose and well-crafted characters make clear why.'—Tampa Bay Times
'Jon Chopan has written the book every writer wishes they could have written—stories that are both the fly on the wall, and the beating heart of its characters. The prose moves from raw, unfettered observations, to poetic descriptions that reveal the face behind the mask. Somewhere in the middle, these unforgettable stories take hold, and don't let go.'—Katey Schultz, author of Flashes of War
'An inherently fascinating, entertaining, thoughtful and thought-provoking read from beginning to end, Veterans Crisis Hotline is unreservedly recommended for personal reading lists, as well as community and academic library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections.'—Library Bookwatch
Jon Chopan is assistant professor of creative writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. His first collection, Pulled from the River, was published in 2011, and his work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Hotel Amerika, Post Road, Epiphany, and The Southampton Review, among other outlets.
