War As It Is – Gert Ledig’s German War Fiction: The Stalin Organ, and Payback
Gert Ledig was of the generation of German writers who fought in World War II and lived to write about …
Tag Archives: Fiction:WW II
The Gallery by John Horne Burns: Americans in Naples, 1944
Missing in almost all war fiction, from the time of Gilgamesh (2800 BCE) on, is the recognition that war …
One Man’s Justice – Akira Yoshimura
The stories we tell about what we know and what we suppose, what we fear and what we love, …
War Resistance in Japan, WWII
Avoidance of conscription in Japan during WWII was the most heinous of crimes: worse than rape, or murder. Those …
Stalingrad, a Novel – Theodore Plievier
War
Fleeing War — Walter Kempowski: All for Nothing
War stories since The Iliad ( 8th century BCE) have been told to fascinate and celebrate physical courage, mental …
The Sea and Poison — Shūsaku Endō, confronting War Crimes
Pride in our ancestors, and countrymen is common in stories we tell each other, of their hard work, sacrifice …
Zone of Emptiness – A Japanese Novel of WWII
Zone of Emptiness by the Japanese novelist Hiroshi Noma, when it was published in 1952 after years of military censorship, …
Andre Malraux — Man in his Violence
Andre Malraux was the quintessential adventurer-intellectual of the between the World War years. Man’s Hope was on 1960s high school …
The Twenty-Three Days of the City of Alba
World traveling, wine loving tourists might be forgiven for not associating the famed, vine-covered hills of Piemonte, Italy, with savage, civil …
Naples Liberated: Curzio Malaparte’s “The Skin”
It is hard to think of another work of fiction of such savage irony as Curzio Malaparte‘s La Pelle (1949) …
Hiroshima Joe – A Novel
Seeing the smoking wasteland of Hiroshima, particularly the blasted home and shredded family of a friend immediately after the Bomb …