Friends of the Simsbury Public Library
Author Event with Phil Klay
Wednesday, October 20 at 7 p.m. Simsbury Public Library Program Room
Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment, will join the Friends of the Simsbury Public Library on Wednesday, October 20 at 7 p.m. for an in-person event at the library to discuss his latest, critically-acclaimed novel, Missionaries which was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Wall Street Journal Ten Best Books of the Year, an NPR Best Book of the Year, and one of President Obama's Favorite Books of the Year in 2020.
Over the course of the six years he spent working on the novel, Klay, a U.S. Marine veteran who served in Iraq, visited Colombia to interview soldiers, judges, politicians, activists, and people who grew up in paramilitary towns. He began to see that, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, and Yemen alike, the instability of violence as a tool of coercion and control remains constant; its limitations and unexpected outcomes inevitable.
Klay has written a novel of extraordinary suspense infused with geopolitical sophistication and storytelling instincts that are second to none. Missionaries is a window not only into modern war, but into the individual lives that go on long after the drones have left the skies. The Wall Street Journal called the book “a sweeping, interconnected novel of ideas in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Norman Mailer . . . By taking a long view of the ‘rational insanity’ of global warfare, Missionaries brilliantly fills one of the largest gaps in contemporary literature.” “Thorough, forceful, and ambitious . . Missionaries is a deeply ethical novel, and one that often pauses to question the purpose of war and possibility of redemption for combatants of all kinds...NPR.org.
Phil Klay is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He served in Iraq’s Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a Public Affairs Officer. After being discharged he received an MFA from Hunter College of The City University of New York. Klay’s New York Times-bestselling short story collection Redeployment won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014 among other awards. Klay’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the Brookings Institution's Brookings Essay series. He is on the Board of Arts in the Armed Forces and he currently teaches in the MFA writing program at Fairfield University.
RSVP by October 13 at simsburylibrary.info via the Event Calendar. Call the library at (860) 658-7663 with questions.
