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No Man's Land: Writings from a World at War
The Great War gave birth to some of the twentieth century's most celebrated writing; from Brooke to Sassoon, the poetry generated by the war is etched into collective memory. But it is in prose fiction that we find some of the most profound insights into the war's individual and communal tragedies, the horror of life in the trenches and the grand farce of the first industrial war. Featuring forty-seven writers from twenty different nations, representing all the main participants in the conflict, No Man's Land is a truly international anthology of First World War fiction. Work by Siegfried Sassoon, Erich Maria Remarque, Willa Cather and Rose Macaulay sits alongside forgotten masterpieces such as Stratis Myrivilis' Life in the Tomb, Raymond Escholier's Mahmadou Fofana and Mary Borden's The Forbidden Zone. No Man's Land is a brilliant memorial to the twentieth century's most cataclysmic event.
576 pages, Hardcover
First published January 2, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
October 12, 2024
This anthology of writing from WW1 comprises extracts from longer works, mainly fiction but also some memoirs. I read it with the idea I might move on to read some of the longer works. A total of 47 authors are featured. I can’t cover them all in these comments but I’ll try to mention those that stood out, one way or another.
Three were from books that I’ve read in their entirety, All Quiet on the Western Front, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and The Good Soldier Ŝvejk. There were a few others from books that have not been translated into English – we only have the extracts here. This seems to be the case with the writers Prežihov Voranc, Miroslav Krleža and Miloš Crnjanski, respectively a Slovene, a Croat and a Serb, all of whom were conscripted into the multi-ethnic army of Austria-Hungary. Liviu Rebreanu was an ethnic Romanian in the same army, and included is an extract from his book, available in English as The Forest of the Hanged. There are also several contributions from actual Austrians, notably from Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March. In some cases though, the collection includes spoilers for the full novels.
As might be expected British, French, American and German authors all feature prominently. By comparison, Russia, Turkey and Italy are a bit under-represented, although authors from those countries do feature. There are contributions from nations within the British Empire, and from Life in the Tomb, by Greek author Stratis Myrivilis.
I thought most of the extracts were high quality but a few didn’t work for me, possibly because they were out of context, with no background on the characters. William Baylebridge had a piece taken from An Anzac Muster, and Henri Barbusse from Under Fire, and both fell into this category.
Naturally enough, most of the texts feature the horror of life in the trenches, and the sheer number of them meant they started to have a similar feel. One that stood out was from a novella called The German Prisoner, by a writer called James Hanley who served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. It features two British soldiers brutally mistreating a POW. I don’t think I would want to read the whole thing as the descriptions of sadism are a bit much, but I won’t deny it had an impact. Arnold Zweig’s The Case of Sergeant Grischa was another striking entry. Emilio Lussu was a Sardinian whose book has been published in English as A Soldier on the Southern Front, and also under the title Sardinian Brigade.
Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Across the Black Waters features an Indian Division arriving in Marseille early in the war. The author captures the fascination of the Indian soldiers with their first sight of Europe, and the fascination of the French civilians with them. Joseph Pla was a Catalan whose journal The Grey Notebook provides a perspective of 1918 from someone living in a neutral country, where many had benefited economically from the war. Jean Giono is a writer I have long been curious about, and he features here with To The Slaughterhouse. Part of Frederic Manning’s curiously named novel Her Privates We provides some light relief, with a scene of linguistic confusion between a British corporal and the French matron he is billeted with, which had me chortling along.
The compiler has included a good number of female writers, some of whom worked as medical staff near the frontline. American Mary Borden provides a harrowing account from this perspective, from The Forbidden Zone. Helen Zenna Smith was too young to take on such a role, but in 1930 she published Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War, based on the diary of a real WW1 nurse, with an interesting angle on how women’s attitudes were affected. Robin Hyde was a NZ writer and prison reformer. In the 1930s she was visiting a prison when an inmate called J.D. Stark asked her to write a book about his wartime experiences. He seems to have been one of life’s characters, shall we say. The book is called Passport to Hell. A.T. Fitzroy was the penname of Rose Allatini, who in 1918 published Despised and Rejected, featuring male characters who were both pacifist and gay, extremely controversial issues at the time. The book was banned in October 1918 and not republished until the 1970s. Judging from the extract though, it might be too polemical for my taste.
This collection has its good and bad points, but it has given me some ideas for further reading.
Three were from books that I’ve read in their entirety, All Quiet on the Western Front, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and The Good Soldier Ŝvejk. There were a few others from books that have not been translated into English – we only have the extracts here. This seems to be the case with the writers Prežihov Voranc, Miroslav Krleža and Miloš Crnjanski, respectively a Slovene, a Croat and a Serb, all of whom were conscripted into the multi-ethnic army of Austria-Hungary. Liviu Rebreanu was an ethnic Romanian in the same army, and included is an extract from his book, available in English as The Forest of the Hanged. There are also several contributions from actual Austrians, notably from Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March. In some cases though, the collection includes spoilers for the full novels.
As might be expected British, French, American and German authors all feature prominently. By comparison, Russia, Turkey and Italy are a bit under-represented, although authors from those countries do feature. There are contributions from nations within the British Empire, and from Life in the Tomb, by Greek author Stratis Myrivilis.
I thought most of the extracts were high quality but a few didn’t work for me, possibly because they were out of context, with no background on the characters. William Baylebridge had a piece taken from An Anzac Muster, and Henri Barbusse from Under Fire, and both fell into this category.
Naturally enough, most of the texts feature the horror of life in the trenches, and the sheer number of them meant they started to have a similar feel. One that stood out was from a novella called The German Prisoner, by a writer called James Hanley who served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. It features two British soldiers brutally mistreating a POW. I don’t think I would want to read the whole thing as the descriptions of sadism are a bit much, but I won’t deny it had an impact. Arnold Zweig’s The Case of Sergeant Grischa was another striking entry. Emilio Lussu was a Sardinian whose book has been published in English as A Soldier on the Southern Front, and also under the title Sardinian Brigade.
Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Across the Black Waters features an Indian Division arriving in Marseille early in the war. The author captures the fascination of the Indian soldiers with their first sight of Europe, and the fascination of the French civilians with them. Joseph Pla was a Catalan whose journal The Grey Notebook provides a perspective of 1918 from someone living in a neutral country, where many had benefited economically from the war. Jean Giono is a writer I have long been curious about, and he features here with To The Slaughterhouse. Part of Frederic Manning’s curiously named novel Her Privates We provides some light relief, with a scene of linguistic confusion between a British corporal and the French matron he is billeted with, which had me chortling along.
The compiler has included a good number of female writers, some of whom worked as medical staff near the frontline. American Mary Borden provides a harrowing account from this perspective, from The Forbidden Zone. Helen Zenna Smith was too young to take on such a role, but in 1930 she published Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War, based on the diary of a real WW1 nurse, with an interesting angle on how women’s attitudes were affected. Robin Hyde was a NZ writer and prison reformer. In the 1930s she was visiting a prison when an inmate called J.D. Stark asked her to write a book about his wartime experiences. He seems to have been one of life’s characters, shall we say. The book is called Passport to Hell. A.T. Fitzroy was the penname of Rose Allatini, who in 1918 published Despised and Rejected, featuring male characters who were both pacifist and gay, extremely controversial issues at the time. The book was banned in October 1918 and not republished until the 1970s. Judging from the extract though, it might be too polemical for my taste.
This collection has its good and bad points, but it has given me some ideas for further reading.
December 3, 2025
A beautiful collection of stories that range from heroic and brave to the angst and pains of one of the worlds worst conflicts. For anyone who says that soldiers are hardened men who fear nothing and should not waste their time with frivolous things like writing, reading, and other "non-warrior" tasks, I would like them to read these stories and accounts of the men on the fields. You feel it in each story, and although it has been 110+ years since the conflict, you can still imagine it like it was yesterday.
Fantastic collection, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the literary movement of the war and the long line of war poets and authors of WWI.
Fantastic collection, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the literary movement of the war and the long line of war poets and authors of WWI.
October 28, 2018
This is a good diverse collection of pieces from both sides which fought in World War I. Part of my ongoing reading on the 100th anniversary of the ending of the war. Many of these pieces were quite poignant.
October 18, 2017
This is an anthology of short stories and memoir pieces written by writers from many countries who had experienced World War I firsthand or were part of that era. I first began this book at the beginning of September but quit halfway through because I found the stories were all blending into each other. Most of the settings were either the battle trenches or field hospitals and I could not keep the stories straight. I began the second half again in the beginning of October and I took it more slowly. While there is a good mix of writers from many nationalities, this is a book to read slowly to distinguish all the writers from each other.
March 29, 2024
This was a really solid compilation of some of the best fictional and semi-fictional writing about the Great War. I thought the decision to include only writing that was done before the Second World War, as well as the fact that most authors had first hand experience of the war, made this compilation very strong and well worth the read. Not all of the excerpts were great, in my opinion, but that is to be expected in a collection that includes 47 different authors.
I want to highlight some of the best authors that were in this book for anyone who doesn't want to read all 47 but would still like to get into the world of Great War fictional writing. No Man's Land has some particularly strong English writers, which likely reflects the first language of its compiling editor. In particular, Siegfried Sassoon, Vera Brittain, Helen Zenna Smith, Mary Borden, Richard Aldington, Frederic Manning, and A.P. Herbert were fantastic. Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero continues to be my favourite piece of fiction about the Great War. The excerpts from the above authors made me want to read further in the field. No Man's Land also had some incredible writing from non-English authors. In particular, I enjoyed the Italian Emilio Lussu, the Germans Ernst Junger, Erich Maria Remarque, Theodor Pliever, and Edlef Koppen, the Russian Viktor Shklovsky, the French Gabriel Chevallier and Jean Giono, and the Armenian Vahan Totovents. Wow, that was a mouthful. Try saying that ten times fast. If you can't find something you like from the above list, Great War fiction is not your cup of tea.
Although I really enjoyed reading this collection, it definitely dragged at times. The editor didn't seem to have a very strong organizing principle for the book as a whole, so authors are loosely grouped by nationality but there is also a general sense of progression in time, but that progression is not a definite rule, which can make some portions of the book feel jarring or out of place. Furthermore, the book bills itself as a collection of writing that represents the experiences of men on various fronts of a world at war. To be fair, it does include writing from a wide range of the many different theatres of war, when much of the writing about the war has been centred on the Western Front. However, this book is overwhelmingly made up of a specific kind of postwar writing that focuses disproportionately on the horrifying and disillusioning aspect of the war from a specific angle. A great number of the writers were communists and/or pacifists following the war, which is indicated by the way that they represent the events of the war. Now, to be fair to Pete Ayrton, Communism was wildly attractive in the interwar literary community, before the purges of Stalin and the Cold War had made their mark on the movement's perception in the West, so it will always be prevalent in any compilation of writing from this time period. However, I think that more could have been done to find writing that represented a wider range of views about the war. The excerpts from No Man's Land tend to bleed together at a certain point. Although the writing quality is still high, every author holds the general premise of the war as a catastrophe of greedy politicians and imperialists, inept generals, cowardly officers, and bewildered masses of men tricked by a system more powerful than they are. That is certainly an influential view of the war that has largely dictated the cultural memory of the war, but it is not the only perspective to come out of the interwar writing. I think an opportunity was really missed here to contrast famous anti-war writing with lesser known, but more contemporarily popular, pro-war (or romantic) writing. But, this is not my edited collection!
The final gripe I had with the way that Pete Ayrton put this together, was the lack of explanation or contextual info about each entry. There is a short paragraph about the author and their life at the end of each passage (why it isn't at the start is another story but to each their own), but there are very very few footnotes in the passages that could serve to clear up certain terminology or explain context that is missing because the excerpt is from the middle, or even the end, of a book. In an edited collection this is usually a major part of the editing process, and it seems like Ayrton skipped out on it in favour of adding more authors. Due to the overall slant of the writers involved, and the lack of editorial comments, this collection almost feels more like a book that you would get if you were already widely read in the field and you just wanted to have a single book that compiled many of your favourite authors. As an introduction into the foray, it lacks context and information that would be required to fully grasp many of the excerpts.
Now all that being said I definitely recommend this book because I think that everyone should read more books from this time period. If this is how you want to read a wide range of authors from that field and get a better sense of some books you might like, it is a worthy undertaking. If you could only read two full books from the authors included here, I would say that Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front are the two best ones.
I want to highlight some of the best authors that were in this book for anyone who doesn't want to read all 47 but would still like to get into the world of Great War fictional writing. No Man's Land has some particularly strong English writers, which likely reflects the first language of its compiling editor. In particular, Siegfried Sassoon, Vera Brittain, Helen Zenna Smith, Mary Borden, Richard Aldington, Frederic Manning, and A.P. Herbert were fantastic. Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero continues to be my favourite piece of fiction about the Great War. The excerpts from the above authors made me want to read further in the field. No Man's Land also had some incredible writing from non-English authors. In particular, I enjoyed the Italian Emilio Lussu, the Germans Ernst Junger, Erich Maria Remarque, Theodor Pliever, and Edlef Koppen, the Russian Viktor Shklovsky, the French Gabriel Chevallier and Jean Giono, and the Armenian Vahan Totovents. Wow, that was a mouthful. Try saying that ten times fast. If you can't find something you like from the above list, Great War fiction is not your cup of tea.
Although I really enjoyed reading this collection, it definitely dragged at times. The editor didn't seem to have a very strong organizing principle for the book as a whole, so authors are loosely grouped by nationality but there is also a general sense of progression in time, but that progression is not a definite rule, which can make some portions of the book feel jarring or out of place. Furthermore, the book bills itself as a collection of writing that represents the experiences of men on various fronts of a world at war. To be fair, it does include writing from a wide range of the many different theatres of war, when much of the writing about the war has been centred on the Western Front. However, this book is overwhelmingly made up of a specific kind of postwar writing that focuses disproportionately on the horrifying and disillusioning aspect of the war from a specific angle. A great number of the writers were communists and/or pacifists following the war, which is indicated by the way that they represent the events of the war. Now, to be fair to Pete Ayrton, Communism was wildly attractive in the interwar literary community, before the purges of Stalin and the Cold War had made their mark on the movement's perception in the West, so it will always be prevalent in any compilation of writing from this time period. However, I think that more could have been done to find writing that represented a wider range of views about the war. The excerpts from No Man's Land tend to bleed together at a certain point. Although the writing quality is still high, every author holds the general premise of the war as a catastrophe of greedy politicians and imperialists, inept generals, cowardly officers, and bewildered masses of men tricked by a system more powerful than they are. That is certainly an influential view of the war that has largely dictated the cultural memory of the war, but it is not the only perspective to come out of the interwar writing. I think an opportunity was really missed here to contrast famous anti-war writing with lesser known, but more contemporarily popular, pro-war (or romantic) writing. But, this is not my edited collection!
The final gripe I had with the way that Pete Ayrton put this together, was the lack of explanation or contextual info about each entry. There is a short paragraph about the author and their life at the end of each passage (why it isn't at the start is another story but to each their own), but there are very very few footnotes in the passages that could serve to clear up certain terminology or explain context that is missing because the excerpt is from the middle, or even the end, of a book. In an edited collection this is usually a major part of the editing process, and it seems like Ayrton skipped out on it in favour of adding more authors. Due to the overall slant of the writers involved, and the lack of editorial comments, this collection almost feels more like a book that you would get if you were already widely read in the field and you just wanted to have a single book that compiled many of your favourite authors. As an introduction into the foray, it lacks context and information that would be required to fully grasp many of the excerpts.
Now all that being said I definitely recommend this book because I think that everyone should read more books from this time period. If this is how you want to read a wide range of authors from that field and get a better sense of some books you might like, it is a worthy undertaking. If you could only read two full books from the authors included here, I would say that Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front are the two best ones.
July 12, 2017
A bit grim, but that was to be expected. Goodreads has the title wrong - my copy is subtitled Writings from a world at war, not Fiction. Some of the excerpts were fictionalised accounts, others straight memoirs - it wasn't always clear which until you got to the biographical note at the end of each section. It would have been more helpful to have those notes at the beginning of the sections, to give context.
August 1, 2024
More like 3.5 stars. Some stories were better than others. Since some stories were excerpts, it felt a little disjointed. Almost as though you were dropped in the middle of a book. The editor tried to compensate by adding in multiple chapters.
Overall, there was a nice variety of stories from different viewpoints. Especially from the perspective of women, Turks, Armenians, Slavs, and of course the popular authors of that time.
Overall, there was a nice variety of stories from different viewpoints. Especially from the perspective of women, Turks, Armenians, Slavs, and of course the popular authors of that time.
May 8, 2015
Disclaimer: I received this book for free as part of Goodreads' First Read program.
As the title suggests, this book is a compilation of fiction relating to WWI. The sampled works include both short stories and excerpts from novels. Featured authors hailed from many different countries (UK, Australia, France, Germany, Russia, India, Croatia, America, Italy, Austria, Armenia, Turkey, etc.) and from different perspectives (soldiers, nurses, spouses). In the introduction, Ayrton describes the process by which he chose the stories, attempting to include as many different perspectives as possible, and he details some differences he noted based on country of origin and the demographics of the authors. Ayrton also decided to not include any work written after 1945, feeling that WWII substantially changed the outlook the world had on WWI, so all of the included fiction was written before the end of WWII.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. Some of the stories were very vivid and well-written, although others did capture my attention as much either due to the author's style or writing. Likewise, some of the authors are fairly famous (D.H. Lawrence, Remarque, Trumbo, Sassoon, and Faulkner), while others were much lesser known. With that said, many of the authors of which I had previously been unaware wrote very well, including Emilio Lussu, Robin Hyde, and Helen Zenna Smith.
While Aytron attempted to draw attention to the differences between the works in his introduction, the similarities between them stood out to me much more starkly; all of these stories are anti-war. Admittedly, they may be sub-categorized somewhat within that genre, with focuses on the futility of killing, resentment toward corrupt leaders/capitalism which spurred the war, a detachment between soldiers/nurses and home society (particularly among the British stories), frustration with military leadership, or the nature of humans in war. Still, do not expect any examples of propaganda within this book, and some stories are somewhat uncomfortable to read in the descriptions of soldiers losing their minds, of vivid hospital depictions, and of criticisms of non-combatants on the home front.
One thing that I did not like about this collection was the fact that it is a collection; the stories' ordering did not seem to have a particular logic, and skipping between writers, settings, and time frames made the book a little disjointed. Thus, it is not likely to be something you pick up and cannot put down. There also seemed to be a preponderance of British fiction relative to the other combatant nations, which is probably due to the author's nationality, the language of the works, and the amount of fiction that came out of the UK after the war. Nevertheless, there is value to this book, as it gives a great sampling for one to choose full-length novels from, to gain a broad perspective on WWI as seen from those who witnessed it, or for use in an educational setting. With that in mind, I recommend this book for those looking to learn about WWI from an individual, rather than macro, perspective, and for teachers/professors who might see use in choosing particular stories for comparing and contrasting viewpoints.
As the title suggests, this book is a compilation of fiction relating to WWI. The sampled works include both short stories and excerpts from novels. Featured authors hailed from many different countries (UK, Australia, France, Germany, Russia, India, Croatia, America, Italy, Austria, Armenia, Turkey, etc.) and from different perspectives (soldiers, nurses, spouses). In the introduction, Ayrton describes the process by which he chose the stories, attempting to include as many different perspectives as possible, and he details some differences he noted based on country of origin and the demographics of the authors. Ayrton also decided to not include any work written after 1945, feeling that WWII substantially changed the outlook the world had on WWI, so all of the included fiction was written before the end of WWII.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. Some of the stories were very vivid and well-written, although others did capture my attention as much either due to the author's style or writing. Likewise, some of the authors are fairly famous (D.H. Lawrence, Remarque, Trumbo, Sassoon, and Faulkner), while others were much lesser known. With that said, many of the authors of which I had previously been unaware wrote very well, including Emilio Lussu, Robin Hyde, and Helen Zenna Smith.
While Aytron attempted to draw attention to the differences between the works in his introduction, the similarities between them stood out to me much more starkly; all of these stories are anti-war. Admittedly, they may be sub-categorized somewhat within that genre, with focuses on the futility of killing, resentment toward corrupt leaders/capitalism which spurred the war, a detachment between soldiers/nurses and home society (particularly among the British stories), frustration with military leadership, or the nature of humans in war. Still, do not expect any examples of propaganda within this book, and some stories are somewhat uncomfortable to read in the descriptions of soldiers losing their minds, of vivid hospital depictions, and of criticisms of non-combatants on the home front.
One thing that I did not like about this collection was the fact that it is a collection; the stories' ordering did not seem to have a particular logic, and skipping between writers, settings, and time frames made the book a little disjointed. Thus, it is not likely to be something you pick up and cannot put down. There also seemed to be a preponderance of British fiction relative to the other combatant nations, which is probably due to the author's nationality, the language of the works, and the amount of fiction that came out of the UK after the war. Nevertheless, there is value to this book, as it gives a great sampling for one to choose full-length novels from, to gain a broad perspective on WWI as seen from those who witnessed it, or for use in an educational setting. With that in mind, I recommend this book for those looking to learn about WWI from an individual, rather than macro, perspective, and for teachers/professors who might see use in choosing particular stories for comparing and contrasting viewpoints.
December 26, 2015
I finished this book about a month ago, but never got the chance to add a review. It's one of the many books published to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of World War I, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
It's a collection of fictional short stories and excerpts, although many are pseudo-autobiographical. Some are heart-wrenching, some uplifting, almost all are engrossing. The collections comes from across the scope of the war: not just the western front but also the eastern front, the Italian front, Gallipoli, etc; and all participants.
I especially like the stories that highlight the growing awareness on the home front of the pointlessness of the struggle, and the tensions between the oft-warmongering older generation and the heroic-image press, and the young men who actually had to join the slaughter.
There are authors known and unknown here: from D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, and Erich Maria Remarque to Arnold Zweig, Josep Pla, and Irene Rathbone. It's not for the faint hearted, but one does not need to be a military history buff to enjoy the humanity of the stories - for good and bad.
I'm not usually a short-story fan, but I really enjoyed the book and its broad sweep.
It's a collection of fictional short stories and excerpts, although many are pseudo-autobiographical. Some are heart-wrenching, some uplifting, almost all are engrossing. The collections comes from across the scope of the war: not just the western front but also the eastern front, the Italian front, Gallipoli, etc; and all participants.
I especially like the stories that highlight the growing awareness on the home front of the pointlessness of the struggle, and the tensions between the oft-warmongering older generation and the heroic-image press, and the young men who actually had to join the slaughter.
There are authors known and unknown here: from D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, and Erich Maria Remarque to Arnold Zweig, Josep Pla, and Irene Rathbone. It's not for the faint hearted, but one does not need to be a military history buff to enjoy the humanity of the stories - for good and bad.
I'm not usually a short-story fan, but I really enjoyed the book and its broad sweep.
March 2, 2015
I thought about saying that if you've ever thought about sending your kids to war, or someone else's kids, or if you've ever profited from war, or if you've ever said," You must be proud that he/she has sacrificed their lives for ______(their country, God, Allah, me, the flag, freedom, the free market, etc.)" or if you would rather give time and money after men and women are maimed and disfigured and crippled rather than before to prevent them from getting maimed and disfigured and crippled and dead, then you ought to read this anthology. But I'm not going to say all that. It just won't matter to most of us and Gandhi and Jesus are dead. After a hundred years, we're all still doing the same things, still mouthing the same platitudes, still telling ourselves the same old lies. Kudos to Mr. Ayrton for this collection, the best of its kind I've ever read. He includes pieces by authors from all the Fronts, particularly from Germany eastward, as well as from that often hidden Front, the home. Perhaps this book should be required in junior high schools. Perhaps that lies our hope.
November 6, 2014
NO MAN’S LAND: FICTION FROM A WORLD AT WAR, 1914-1918 is a biting reminder that war, any war, is hell. And WWI was also mud, blood, lice, death, stench, dismay and lack of hope, the ennui of days on end with lack of sleep, poor food, mud in everything and rats.
Lots and lots of rats.
The rats were having a feeding frenzy.
The stories are told by many nationalities and ages from both sides of the trenches. This is a bleak and unremorseful look at war stripped of all the glory leaving only the tattered remains of the dead behind.
The writing itself is nearly uniformly excellent, but the tales are by and large disheartening.
I had a hard time wading through this sea of tragedy and despair, but it does offer a very revealing glimpse into the live of a generation that is gone from us now. My husband had an easier time but did find much of the book to be depressing.
I won this book through Goodreads.
Lots and lots of rats.
The rats were having a feeding frenzy.
The stories are told by many nationalities and ages from both sides of the trenches. This is a bleak and unremorseful look at war stripped of all the glory leaving only the tattered remains of the dead behind.
The writing itself is nearly uniformly excellent, but the tales are by and large disheartening.
I had a hard time wading through this sea of tragedy and despair, but it does offer a very revealing glimpse into the live of a generation that is gone from us now. My husband had an easier time but did find much of the book to be depressing.
I won this book through Goodreads.
May 27, 2016
This is an anthology, so my guess is that you'll love some of the selections and simply like others. Pete Ayrton is the former publisher and editor of Serpent's Tail Press, which may give you some idea of what his taste is like. To give you an idea, and this is not about The Great War, he published the reissue of Cutter & Bone in 2001 -- a book with a small but avid following which was made into the film Cutter's Way (1982) with John Heard, Jeff Bridges, and Lisa Eichhorn. Directed by Ivan Passer. Without spoilers, you have a pretty good idea of what kind of things Pete Ayrton would select for this huge anthology.
November 25, 2014
This book is a collection of excerpts from longer works of fiction set in the time of the first world war. Each excerpt includes a brief account of the original publication and a few lines about the author. All in all the book left me unsatisfied because the stories were not quite enough to satisfy my interest. I did particular enjoy the stories that reflected WWI from a woman's point of view because they revealed the sorrow of war outside of the battle front.
October 21, 2014
Disclaimer: this book was provided to me for review.
Wow. This book blew my mind a little. So good. A diverse collection of fiction from WWI, showing so many differing points of view of the same events. Highly recommended.
Wow. This book blew my mind a little. So good. A diverse collection of fiction from WWI, showing so many differing points of view of the same events. Highly recommended.
January 6, 2015
A great anthology of writing on WWI that strives to include authors that most readers may not have encountered. I found sections from nurses and Eastern European writers very compelling
March 15, 2015
Selection of literature written about World War I, from both famous and not so famous authors, including D.H. Lawrence, Eric Remarque, Willa Cather and William Faulkner.
April 7, 2016
Fiction about World War I from 50 writers will cause history buffs to look into purchasing full books from the tantalizing excerpts presented here.
July 17, 2016
Described by Helen Dunmore as:"Superb....an impressive anthology that bears an extraordinary cargo of human experience"; I cannot improve upon that.
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