“I literally went straight to New York City from Iraq, which was bizarre and complicated. I was walking down Madison Avenue, and it was spring, and people were smartly dressed, and it was so strange because there was no sense that we were at war. It was something to grapple with.”

American writer

Phil Klay is an American writer. He won the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his first book-length publication, the short story collection Redeployment. That same year, the National Book Foundation named him a 5 under 35 honoree. His 2020 novel, Missionaries, was included among Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year and was also named one of The Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Books of the Year.