The Things They Carried - Couverture rigide

"The Things They Carried is as good as any piece of literature can get . . . It is controlled and wild, deep and tough, perceptive and shrewd." --Chicago Sun Times "[A] marvel of storytelling.... In prose that combines the sharp, unsentimental rhythms of Hemingway with gentler, more lyrical descriptions, Mr. O'Brien gives the reader a shockingly visceral sense of what it felt like to tramp through a booby-trapped jungle, carrying 20 pounds of supplies, 14 pounds of ammunition, along with radios, machine guns, assault rifles and grenades. He conjures up the resupply choppers that would arrive every evening with ''fresh watermelons and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen sweaters,'' sparklers for the Fourth of July, and colored eggs for Easter. He describes the stultifying boredom of waiting for action, hour after hour, day after day; and the terrible shock of watching a friend be blown to bits, several feet away.... In addition, he manages that harder thing of making the reader understand the difficulties and consolations of writing about a war - this war, any war, the impossibility of conveying the horror, and the overwhelming need to make sense of that horror by arranging sentences on a page. With 'The Things They Carried, Mr. O'Brien has written a vital, important book--a book that matters not only to the reader interested in Vietnam, but to anyone interested in the craft of writing as well." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "[B]elongs high on the list of best fiction about any war....crystallizes the Vietnam experience for everyone [and] exposes the nature of all war stories." --New York Times, "Books of the Century"

A classic, life-changing meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling, with more than two-million copies in print

Depicting the men of Alpha Company—Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three—the stories in The Things They Carried opened our eyes to the nature of war in a way we will never forget. It is taught everywhere, from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing, and in the decades since its publication it has never failed to challenge our perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, and courage, longing, and fear.