Arts of War on the Web

Tim O’Brien’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is rolling out a huge marketing package to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the publication of his iconic collection of interconnected in-country Vietnam War short stories, The Things They Carried. The book has sold some two million copies and is a stable in high school and college English and Vietnam War history classes,

That campaign features, among other things, a new jacket (above) for the book, which is now available in paperback, hardcover, e book, and Kindle; a traditional in-person book tour; and a live webcast that starts at 1:00 Eastern time on Monday, March 22. To sign up for that webcast and to see a list of O’Brien’s live events as well as other O’Brien material, go to the website his publisher has created for the 20th anniversary.

Time goes quickly when you’re in the upper middle age brackets, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that 2010 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War classic, The Things They Carried. This simply but powerfully and evocatively written book of five linked short stories was an instant critical and popular success, remains in print and has been required reading for college and high school students since the late ’80s.

To commemorate the event, O’Brien, the former Vietnam War infantryman, will do a year-long series of readings and talks on the book. The first one will be held March 16 in Berkeley, California.

For more info on the book, on O’Brien and on his other work, along with a list of the events, go to the  Tim O’Brien homepage, a long-time labor of love put together by Marilyn Knapp Litt.

Richard Currey’s classic Vietnam War and post-war novel, Fatal Light, which came out to sterling reviews in 1989, is about to be published in a new 20th Anniversary Edition from the Santa Fe Writers Project (204 pp., $14, paper). That most excellent event will be celebrated with a reading by Currey, who served as a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, on Sunday, April 5, at 2:00 p.m., at The Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Currey has written an introduction to the new edition, which sets the novel in its overall place and links it to future wars, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can read the intro on Currey’s web site.

Tim O’Brien, the acclaimed novelist (Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, et al.) and Vietnam War veteran who teaches at Texas State University, San Marcos, will take part in two events on Sunday, March 8, and Monday, March 9, at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey.

He will host “An Afternoon With Tim O’Brien” on March 8, at 1:00 p.m., and be the featured guest in the college’s Visiting Writer Series on March 9 at 7:00 p.m. The events are sponsored by the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation and Brookdale’s Visiting Writers Series.

The $5 donation suggested for the Sunday event will benefit the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Foundation. For info about the Sunday event, call 732-335-0033 or go to the N.J. Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial website. To learn more about the Monday talk, email sparker@brookdalecc.edu, call 732-224-2650, or go to http://www.app.com/article/20090304/GETPUBLISHED/90304039

Clinical psychotherapist Ed Tick’s 1997 book, War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder is now available on CD from Quest Books. The six-CD set, like the book, is a distillation of the author’s work with Vietnam War and other veterans over the last three decades. In it, Tick uses case studies to illustrate his theory of the importance of how deep-rooted psychological and spiritual issues influence the cause and treatment of PTSD. This is a valuable addition to the literature of war mental trauma and how to come to grips with it.

Graham Greene, the prolific British novelist who wrote The Quiet American, the seminal fictional work dealing with the American misadventure in Vietnam, was also a prolific letter writer. Greene wrote some 2,000 letters or postcards every year, according to the newly published Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (Norton, 446 pp., $35), edited by Richard Greene.

Among them was a 1977 letter in which Graham Greene commented on the pioneering Vietnam War book, Dispatches by former Esquire correspondent Michael Herr. In the letter Greene had something insightful to say about how to write about the horrors of war.

To wit: “I was rather put off by the opening part which seemed to me too excitable, but Herr calmed down a bit later. I think when one is dealing with horrors one should write very coldly. Otherwise it reads like hidden boasting—’just see what a brave chap I am to have voluntarily put myself int he way of such experiences.’”