Author: David Abrams

David Abrams is the author of Fobbit (Grove/Atlantic, 2012), a comedy about the Iraq War that Publishers Weekly called “an instant classic” and named a Top 10 Pick for Literary Fiction in Fall 2012. It was also a New York Times Notable Book of 2012, an Indie Next pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, a Montana Honor Book, and a finalist for the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Abrams’ short stories have appeared in the anthologies Watchlist (O/R Books, 2015), Red, White and True (Potomac Books, 2014), Fire and Forget (Da Capo Press, 2013) and Home of the Brave: Somewhere in the Sand (Press 53, 2013). Other stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salon, High Desert Journal, Salamander, Connecticut Review, F(r)iction, The Greensboro Review, Consequence, and many other publications. Abrams earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. He retired from active-duty after serving in the U.S. Army for 20 years, a career that took him to Alaska, Texas, Georgia, the Pentagon, and Iraq. He now lives in Butte, Montana with his wife. He blogs about books at The Quivering Pen: www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com
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Welcome to the First Day of the Rest of Your War

We’d just started our second week of basic training at Fort Benning when they flicked on the TV and we watched the plane go into the skyscraper. It was silky-smooth, the way the building swallowed the jetliner, and I remember thinking it was pretty good for a movie special effect. Yeah, I thought I was pretty smart, the real badass of the platoon, but as it turned out, I didn’t know jack shit.