25 War Stories
Humankind has always waged war. And people have been telling stories about war ever since they started fighting them. George Vlachonikolis reviews Men At War: What Fiction Tells us About Conflict, From The Iliad to Catch-22, in which Christopher Coker aims “to grasp the essence of war as a cultural phenomenon through its existential codes instantiated by 25 literary figures.” Here are the stories in which those figures appear:
- The Iliad, by Homer
- Aeneid, by Virgil
- Hadji Murat, by Leo Tolstoy
- The Aubrey-Maturin series, by Patrick O’Brian
- “Human Moments in World War III,” in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don Delillo
- The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
- The Complete Brigadier General, by Arthur Conan Doyle
- Her Privates We, Frederic Manning
- For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
- Kaputt, by Curzio Malaparte
- The Duel, by Joseph Conrad
- The Confidence Man, by Herman Melville
- The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
- Dr Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, by Stanley Kubrick
- Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
- Henry IV, Part I and Part II, by William Shakespeare
- The Good Soldier Svejk, by Jaroslav Hasek
- Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
- The Sorrow of War, by Boa Nimh
- The Flashman papers, by George MacDonald Fraser
- Philoctetes, by Sophocles
- Colonel Chabert, by Honore de Balzac
- All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
- The Sword of Honour Trilogy, Evelyn Waugh
- Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
Read our review of Coker’s Men At War: What Fiction Tells us About Conflict, From The Iliad to Catch-22.
Image: Combined from Kate Ter Haar and Dennis Jarvis, CC