The MFA Professor and author has published a collection of his non-fiction work, Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War, which has been met with critical acclaim from multiple outlets.
Phil Klay, Fairfield MFA Professor and National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment and Missionaries, has compiled a new collection of his non-fiction writing called Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War, available this week from Penguin Press.
The pieces in Uncertain Ground, collected from publications that span the last ten years, explore the chasm between the military and the civilian in American life, and the moral blind spot it has created.
The New York Times called Klay’s compilation “engrossing and important” and Publisher’s Weekly deemed it an “incisive collection . . . Enriched by the author’s military experiences and sharp turns of phrase.” The Library Journal offered that Klay’s book is “an important and eye-opening essay collection that should be a must-read.”
About the recent critical acclaim, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Richard Greenwald, PhD, said, “This book joins [Klay's] two previous books and clearly establishes him as a major national literary figure. Klay’s Catholic intellectual grounding makes his writing deep and penetrating, revising that tradition in American letters.”
A veteran himself, Klay is at the helm of the Fairfield MFA veterans’ community, leading workshops and supporting veteran writers. He served in Iraq’s Anbar Province as a public affairs officer before receiving his MFA from Hunter College of The City University of New York. His short story collection Redeployment won the 2014 National Book Award, and Missionaries was chosen by former President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2020, and was also named one of “The 10 Best Books of 2020” by The Wall Street Journal.
