Awards and Honors
◊ Named one of Granta’s Best
of Young American Novelists
◊ PEN/Hemingway Finalist
◊ Sue Kaufman Prize from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters
◊ Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship
◊ One of GQ’s Ten Best Books of the Year
◊ A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year
◊ A Village Voice Best Book of the Year
◊ A New York Times New and Noteworthy Paperback
Dear Mr. President
Gabe Hudson served as a rifleman in the Marine Corps Reserve. His story collection, Dear Mr. President, about the Persian Gulf War, has been translated into seven languages. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, Granta, McSweeney’s, Black Book, and The New Yorker. He was a contributing writer for HBO's book, Six Feet Under: Better Living Through Death. Hudson taught at Princeton University from 2004-2007. He is now an assistant professor at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea. He is an editor-at-large for McSweeney’s.
In recent years, he has travelled extensively in Thailand and Vietnam, while researching his novel-in-progress, American Buddha, which will be published by Knopf.
What Others Are Saying
“Hudson is one of the most exciting and innovative young American writers today.”—Joyce Carol Oates
“Hudson is an amazingly gifted writer. His stories are brilliant and sort of crazy but also really smart about his characters.”—Chang-rae Lee, author of Native Speaker and A Gesture Life
“Mr. Hudson’s style goes from zero to one hundred MPH in the first sentence. Faster than a Road Runner cartoon, he reminds us war can be funny as hell.”—Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and Choke
“Hudson writes crazed, energetic stories full of mayhem and heart. This collection summons up a funny, troubling image of America the Invader, clumsily enforcing its will with a high-tech army of narcissists and neurotics.”—George Saunders, author of Pastoralia and In Persuasion Nation
“A classic, it is war literature in its prime. Hudson weaves incredibly humorous and still troubling stories from…Operation Desert Storm, forsaking the mundane for character depth. It works perfectly. In my opinion, it is the best book to come from that war.”—John Crawford, author of The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq
“Beyond their great narrative propulsion and their astonishing but always balanced surreality and humor, Gabe Hudson’s stories have a crucial and rare thing: soul. He’s an important writer.”—Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and What is the What