Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    War Porn
    War Porn
    War Porn
    Audiobook7 hours

    War Porn

    Written by Roy Scranton

    Narrated by Brian Hutchison

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The term "war porn" refers to videos and images brought back from combat zones. IED explosions, air strikes, firefights, images of death and gore largely shorn of context, at times even evidence of potential war crimes (most famously, the photos of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib). "War porn" is also, in Scranton's searing debut, a metaphor for the fragmentation and confusion of modern combat, the broken shards of experience that form the wartime experiences of soldiers and civilians alike. The three sections of War Porn fit inside one another like nesting dolls: from an end of summer barbecue in the American Southwest; to the perspective of a young US soldier in the early months of the occupation of Iraq; to the story of Qasim al-Zabadi, an Iraqi math professor who faces the American invasion with a blend of fear, denial, and perseverance. Through the eyes of the occupiers, we watch Qasim become an interpreter for US forces, then prisoner and victim. As the scene switches from America to Iraq and back again, as home and hell merge, Qasim reveals the fragile humanity that connects occupier and occupied, torturer and tortured.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateAug 2, 2016
    ISBN9781501919756
    War Porn

    More audiobooks from Roy Scranton

    Related to War Porn

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Gun Control Puts Your Life At Risk

      Aug 21, 2020

      ACCORDING TO GUN prohibitionists, Europe is much safer than the United States, because Europe has stricter gun control. In fact, the historical record shows that excessive gun control (as in Europe) is about a hundred times more deadly than “insuffic

      5 min read

    • Article

      The False Romance of Russia

      Dec 12, 2019

      The False Romance of Russia
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Flawed Blueprint For The Left

      Sep 29, 2022

      A Flawed Blueprint For The Left
      4 min read

    • Article

      Is Passive Investing 'Worse Than Marxism'?

      Apr 11, 2018

      Passive investing is taking over the world. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but investment researchers at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. say that nearly half of equity assets in the United States are passively managed, and the trend is growing. These same

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Heaven — The Earth

      Sep 10, 2022

      Instead of working on the Amtek account, William Morton stares at his wife’s Instagram. She stands near her black folding chair with hands on hips, a living cliché. He grabs his belly in discomfort. William Morton, VP-Sales, finds rolls of fat where

      18 min read

    • Article

      Cycles

      Nov 10, 2022

      His online profile was promising: good hair, straight teeth, college degree. And he was nice-looking too, in his photo anyway, standing on a clifftop with the sun rising over his welldefined, muscular shoulder. He was attractive enough, the kind of u

      18 min read

    • Article

      The Book of Loki

      Mar 12, 2018

      The Book of Loki
      20 min read

    • Article

      Push

      Aug 4, 2022

      Push
      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Sep 1, 2020

      Her arm was in the other roomwhen he arrived—not with her bodystill breathing in the livingroom. In and out of consciousness.And blood of course.But not as much as you might expect.So he retrieved the arm—lifted it into a bag full of herfreezer conte

      2 min read

    • Article

      Peter Mountford

      Dec 15, 2017

      Vivian spends most of the afternoon naked and strapped to the giant ottoman in the interior decorator’s office in Bethesda. When he finally unties her, the sun is low and she’s shaky and exhausted. He paddled her hard at some point, and that hot stin

      28 min read

    • Article

      Where Is Black Life Lived?

      Jul 21, 2020

      Where Is Black Life Lived?
      6 min read

    • Article

      Letter to My Son

      Jul 4, 2015

      Letter to My Son
      30 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Kashana Cauley

      Dec 2, 2022

      Kashana Cauley reflects on 2022 through the books she read. The post A Year in Reading: Kashana Cauley appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2018

      Three Poems
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for War Porn

    3.5/5

    6 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      There has been a flood of books emerging from the current wars in the Mideast, yet Iraq war veteran Roy Scranton has managed to do something quite different with his debut novel, WAR PORN. The story moves back and forth from the home front to the war zone and back again, and also back and forth in time in the early years of the Iraq war. At home, in remote Moab, Utah, a group of friends gather for a back yard barbecue. One of them brings a date, Aaron Stojanowski, a National Guard MP, just back from a tour in Iraq where he worked at a prisoner detention center. The party hostess feels a magnetic attraction to this stranger, but a wide chasm between him and the others, all largely untouched by the war, becomes quickly and explosively apparent.Cut to Iraq, and a soldier named Wilson, a failed poet and drifter from Oregon who joined the army after 9/11. If there is a central character, he's it, as we learn of his pre-Army life in short flashbacks which serve to emphasize his 'different-ness' from his fellow enlistees. Profanity-laced GI talk, with its usual gallows humor, political incorrectness and irreverence abounds as Wilson goes about his daily duties, patrolling, pulling gate duty, transferring prisoners and more, counting down the days 'til his personal hell is over. And then, still in Iraq, we get a look at life on 'the other side,' as a timid Iraqi math professor and his extended family take center stage, first waiting for the American invasion, and then enduring it, caught up in a dark nightmarish madness and personal betrayals. This section alone sets WAR PORN apart to an extent, but it is not really new. This 'other side' viewpoint has already been used quite effectively in a few other novels: Helen Benedict's SAND QUEEN, Elliot Ackerman's GREEN ON BLUE, and, perhaps the best one of all, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya's THE WATCH, with its elements of Greek tragedy.No, there are other things which make Scranton's story different. First. there are short seemingly nonsensical sections placed here and there throughout the narrative, each of them titled simply "Babylon," which confuse the reader and throw him off balance. Here's a sample -"population of two already pleaded to be those targets on the edge of the gallbladder and transverse colon; only those acts which can be said to be half measures, the national Kalashnikovs with a gunshot wound through the rectum; and two with possible war seen war that will be fourteen more casualties arrived OPERATION SIDEWINDER CIA secret prisons at the military's Iraqi Advanced Trauma Life Support protocols for the administration of Bush's decision was over the last six ..."Yes, shades of the mythical Tower of Babel, or perhaps the gobbledygook, or 'babble' you might have heard had you clicked quickly through the TV news channels in those early days of the war. Babylon was, after all, an early name for Iraq. The words of the fragmented reportage splatter the page like paint from a Pollock painting, but it works. Remember the conflicting reports, the half-truths, the 'spin,' the lies, the endless words, words, words ... That's one thing that makes WAR PORN different. The other is much darker: the meaning of the title itself - dark video images of casual killing, torture and the 'enhanced interrogation techniques' so graphically and minutely described in a recent Iraq memoir, Eric Fair's CONSEQUENCE. Scranton takes those images and literally rubs the reader's face in them in a stunningly horrific concluding sequence.WAR PORN is not an easy read. It will twist your gut and shock your sensibilities. You will come away shaken. And yet the war goes on and on. This is without a doubt an important contribution to the oeuvre of war lit. Very highly recommended.- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA