Kevin Powers reads from "The Yellow Birds"

Please
note: this event will take place in the Weyerhaeuser Chapel, on the
campus of Macalester College (1600 Grand Ave, St Paul).

The Yellow Birds "stands with Tim O’Brien’s enduring Vietnam book, The Things They Carried, as a classic of contemporary war fiction."--Michiko Kakutani

"The
war tried to kill us in the spring." So begins this powerful account of
friendship and loss, written by a veteran of the war in Iraq.

In
Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and
eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches
a bloody battle for the city. Bound together since basic training when
Bartle makes a promise to bring Murphy safely home, the two have been
dropped into a war neither is prepared for.

Through
the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to
protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the
insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from
constant danger. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy
becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle
takes actions he could never have imagined.

With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel that is destined to become a classic.

"This is a novel I've been waiting for. The Yellow Birds is
born from experience and rendered with compassion and intelligence. All
of us owe Kevin Powers our heartfelt gratitude.”—Alice Sebold, author
of The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon

----

Kevin
Powers was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, graduated from
Virginia Commonwealth University, and holds an MFA from the University
of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. He served
in the US Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a
machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar. The Yellow Birds is his first novel.