Free Fire Zone: Short Stories by Vietnam Veterans [Paperback]

Wayne Karlin (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; First Edition edition (1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0070333254
• ISBN-13: 978-0070333253
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,928,019 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Wayne Karlin has published seven novels: Marble Mountain, The Wished-For Country, Prisoners, Lost Armies, The Extras, Us, and Crossover, and three works of creative non-fiction: Rumors and Stones, War Movies, and Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam. While he is perhaps best known for his books about the aftermath of the Vietnam War, he has also written a historical novel set in 17th Century Maryland, a spy novel centered in Eastern Europe and another novel set in the Middle East. His writing career began after service as a Marine in the Vietnam War when he became an editor of Curbstone Press and co-edited the first anthology of veterans' fiction from the war: Free Fire Zone: Short Stories by Vietnam Veterans. More recently, as American editor for Curbstone's Voices from Vietnam series, he has edited and adapted translations of writers from Vietnam, including (with Le Minh Khue and Truong Vu), The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers, which was listed as a Critics' Choice for 1995-1996, and (with Ho Anh Thai) Love After War: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam, an anthology chosen by The San Francisco Chronicle as one of the 100 best books of 2003. Karlin was one of the script writers and a consultant for the film Song of the Stork, a Vietnamese-Singaporean co-production which has won the Best Feature Film title at the Milano Film Festival, was the first Asian film chosen in the Official Selection of the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily, Italy and was in the Official Selection of the Reflection of Our Time category of the Montreal Film Festival and has been shown in other festivals in Belgium, Canada and Thailand. He was the consulting producer and writer for a six part National Public Radio radio series on the aftermath of the Vietnam war. Karlin has received five State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paterson Prize in Fiction for 1999 (with Barbara Kingsolver), and the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in Arts Award in 2005. A Professor of Languages and Literature at the College of Southern Maryland, Karlin is married to Ohnmar Thein Karlin, and has one son, the travel writer Adam Karlin.

Customer Reviews

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3.0 out of 5 stars Free Fire Zone, March 8, 2010

By 

Gary Biggs "G. Biggs" (Central California (The Wasteland)) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Free Fire Zone: Short Stories by Vietnam Veterans (Paperback)

It has been difficult for me to find a truly outsanding collection of short stories about the Vietnam war. This book falls into the ok category for me. I found the title "Free Fire Zone" misleading. All of the stories were well written; however, the majority of them were about soldiers' post combat or non-combat experiences. I know how difficult it is for men who have experienced combat to write about it, but it is important that they do so because non-combants need to visualize the absolute horror of combat.

G. Biggs