Literary Nonfiction. Fiction. Hilary Plum's WATCHFIRES is an intimate account of public and private life during the long years of the "war on terror." This remarkable essay begins in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing and illuminates the relationships among cancer, autoimmune disease, the Iraq War, the Arab Spring, Occupy, veteran suicide, the American epidemic of gun violence, and Plum's family history. The result is an urgent inquiry—philosophical, political, and personal—into the maladies of our age. "Hilary Plum's memoir WATCHFIRES is a tender, twisted, darkly vibrant meditation on the war on terror as autoimmune disease. A quiet work of genius, as hopeful in its punishing honesty as it is rueful in its dire beauty, WATCHFIRES warns, remembers, regrets, recovers. Plum can taste our febrile paranoia and writes it inside out."—Roy Scranton "Hilary Plum's WATCHFIRES derives its title from the military practice of lighting a large fire after a battle, to help those lost to locate the group. How apt, given how lost we are. Composed of paragraph pyres, WATCHFIRES illuminates the illness of our bodies and our body politic. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and of the private illnesses that the author and her family have endured, WATCHFIRES poses poignant and essential questions about our age: where does the self begin and end? Who is the other if not my own (other-abled) body? Is terrorism a political act or a cancer? In the tradition of Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Simone Weil, and William Stafford, Plum shores these half-fictive, all-true fragments against the ruins of our humanity, lost islands in the age of terrorism and autoimmunity."—Philip Metres "Hilary Plum is a remarkably natural essayist and WATCHFIRES is teeming with wisdom, depth, and ache. Flitting among a half-dozen topics with organic ease and wonder, Plum's work is oblique but always precise, personal and utterly controlled—imagine what Virginia Woolf might have written if she'd been intimately familiar with the Boston Marathon bombing, having a partner suffering from cancer, and the forever wars. If there's any justice in the reading world, this book will be read broadly and passed between admirers for decades to come."—Daniel Torday

Watchfires

Literature & Fiction

Plum, Hilary

Literary

Rescue Press

A veteran of the US war in Iraq commits suicide, and his brother joins with four friends in search of ways to protest the war. Together they undertake a series of small-scale bombings until an explosion claims one of their own. This grave and elegant novel is an elegy for these two deaths and the war itself. They Dragged Them Through the Streets is a bold meditation on idealism, anger, and the American home front’s experience of today’s wars. This is an innovative work in the great tradition of war literature and a singular chronicle of one generation’s conflicts.

They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

United States

Fiction Collective 2

Excisions

Poetry

Black Lawrence Press

Hole Studies is a book about care and the forms it may take. An essay collectionon writing and labor, art and activism, attention as a transformative practice,difference and collaboration, adjuncting and the margins of the academy,whiteness and its weapons, professionalization and its discontents, the radicalimportance of surprise, friendship at work, the self and its public and privatemodes: Hole Studies keeps listening. What is it we need from each other? Whatcould we still make happen? This book looks for forms of responsiveness andmoments that matter. Hole Studies would like to work for you.

Hole Studies

Fonograf Editions

Much of what is read as news is fake; still the real news is, at its very best, partial. At the heart of Strawberry Fields is the storied figure of the journalist, who despairs of accountability yet must accept its disorienting weight. This is a global fiction; these shapeshifting journalists together demonstrate the ethics of reading and writing “news from elsewhere.” An antidote to the normalization wielded upon us by narrative, Hilary Plum crafts with dizzying invention a recursive disorientation of stories starting over and over again, without conclusion. The fragmentation of these harrowing truths, ripped from the headlines, is a reprieve; at least it’s not really “happening,” like normal fictions do, simulacra at the speed of life, not really “happening,” at least not at the rate of narrativity. Oh, but it is. This fiction jumps through genres, destabilizing players and circumstances: revolutionary Ireland, Iraq in the midst of US invasion, and Pakistan during years of drone warfare, an eating disorder clinic, a farming community in the midst of pesticide poisoning, the plight of a journalist imprisoned in Mexico. Our throughline is the recurring story of a reporter, Alice, and a detective, Modigliani: together they failed to solve a crime that occurred years ago amid the chaos of a hurricane, and we find them now piecing together the stories of five murdered veterans of the war in Iraq. Making up nothing, or everything, all around the globe these horrors go on daily.

Strawberry Fields: A Novel (Fence Modern Prize in Prose)

Fence Books

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Books by Plum, Hilary