Looking For War And Other Stories (SIGNED COPY) by: Unger, Douglas
Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the half-title page. A debut collection of short fiction from the author of the novel Leaving the Land, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Douglas Unger's fiction is sharp-edged and compelling, whether he's exploring his own boyhood on the street ("Autobiography") or the life of a student lab assistant who bonds with a burnt-out rhesus monkey ("Leslie and Sam") or the strange fate of a young woman who returns from a second honeymoon on a paradisiacal Brazilian island to succumb to a mysterious disease ("Tide Pool"). The collection is capped by the powerful novella "Looking for War," where a would-be war correspondent, whose older brother is a shell-shocked Vietnam vet, stumbles upon his own war in a grisly five-minute action in the jungles of Paraguay.