More praise for Dear Mr. President
“Hudson writes about a pain so vast and shattering that the only way it can safely surveyed is with night goggles and hallucinatory humor. He has a wonderful way of amplifying the take-it-for-granted madness of war…Dear Mr. President documents the damage that war inflicts on America. This depiction of madness, this blur of comedy and tragedy is done with deft humor and convincing passion.”—The San Diego Union Tribune
“Dear Mr. President is a war book like no other. The stories are a surreal mix of the tragic, the violent and the humorous, like war itself. It’s as if Salvador Dali had rewritten All Quiet on the Western Front.”—USA Today
“An acutely inventive collection…. Hudson’s sensitive, lost narrators may be soldiers, but their sentences come from elsewhere entirely—a hilarious world never glimpsed directly but clearly forged from marketing presentations, government bureaucratese and twice-translated slang. Military life, here, is surreal: delusions explode like SCUD missiles. (Hudson is) a writer who confronts the preposterousness of war with some preposterousness all his own.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A classic. This is war literature in its prime. 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. Hudson has been, from the very first stuff of his I read many years ago, one of the two or three young writers who every time they publish I run to see what they’ve done. He combines so many things I count on in fiction I love — great expansive humor, a big-hearted optimism about all that’s possible in the world and in fiction, a very clear moral purpose and a sense of social responsibility, and a willingness to experiment with the form of writing, to push the art of writing further, and with passion.”—Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and What is the What
“A major literary feat. Hudson….is more Kafka than Tolstoy. Like the war at its center, Dear Mr. President is hallucinatory, fast, and wantonly disturbing, but also a victory.” —Men’s Journal
“Hudson displays a brilliantly macabre sense of humor, a fine ear for military and beauracratic cliches, and abundant compassion for his quirky, bruised characters.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Wickedly funny and extremely touching work. Cannot—and should not—be ignored.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Dear Mr. President is a phalanx of ingeniously twisted tales…. Equal parts tragedy and travesty, it manages to be both febrile and funny, sad and sardonic…. Hudson stands on the shoulders of Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut.”—The Boston Phoenix
“Devour this book. . . . You could probably mine the thesaurus all day in a vain attempt to describe Gabe Hudson’s first book, Dear Mr. President. . . . Unique? Definitely, though that doesn’t cover it. Funny, almost always, in a wonderfully twisted way, but this isn’t humor writing. Profound? Sort of, like a Dave Barry version of Apocalypse Now script. He’s the kind of writer who will have you giggling profusely and contemplatively staring at the wall—all in the same paragraph.”—Austin American-Statesman
“The best book to come out of the first Gulf War, Dear Mr. President obeys the first lesson of Heller and Vonnegut: it doesn’t forget to be funny.”—Bold Type
“In Hudson’s weird, wonderful world…. the Persian Gulf War, that outwardly pristine conflict, comes at last into its literary own.”—The Washington Post Book World
“Hudson is a major new voice in fiction…. Dear Mr. President is a splendid combination of humor and horror, absurdity and abomination, delight and disdain. We’d be a better nation if we listened to Hudson’s….gutsy and intelligent take on the America we don’t want to admit we’ve become.”—Houston Chronicle
“These twisted tales about soldiers’ lives manage to be at once hilarious and sobering.”—GQ
“Seductively hallucinatory, subversively comic.”—The Village Voice
“Powerful and entertaining…. Hudson takes us on a hilariously dark tour of the Gulf War experience.”—The Portland Oregonian
"Gabe 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 CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia
“Mr. Hudson’s style goes from zero to one hundred MPH in the first sentence. He reminds us war can be funny as hell.”—Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and Lullaby
“Hudson is…one of the best comic writers of his generation. In the tradition of dark war narratives such as Slaughter-House Five, all of the stories blend humor with the horrors of war.”—Contra Costa Times
“Surreal, disturbingly funny. . . . Beneath the absurd scenarios is real compassion.”—Details
“Ought to be required reading for Congress . . . for it captures with harrowing freshness the madness and stupidity of war. Not unlike the work of another war satirist, Joseph Heller, his heroes survive, if they survive, by retreat into the imagination . . . a study in the psychological complexities of the life of a soldier.”—St. Petersburg Times
“Hudson . . . writes like a grounded, focused combination of Chuck Palahniuk and Kurt Vonnegut. He’s less choppy than either, but occupies a similarly queasy quasi-reality that can be simultaneously entertaining and baffling. His ambiguous stories read as metaphors or case histories, as widely symbolic or unsettlingly literal. That shifting ambiguity, which Hudson’s characters and readers experience in equal measure, makes these stories as compelling as they are disturbing.”—The Onion
“Devastatingly funny…Hudson takes aim at the myth of the American soldier.”—East Bay Express
“Kafkaesque takes on Desert Storm and its aftereffects.”—The Seattle Times
“Hudson uses the Gulf War to warn of war, weirdly and hilariously. . . . Hudson uses patriotic speak, song lyrics, psychobabble, and faux product placement (both military and civilian) to bring his characters to life. Hard to believe such a premise can break your heart, but it can.”—The Hartford Courant
“Surreal and funny as hell, funny and hellish in the absurdist tradition of Catch 22 and Dr. Strangelove. Hudson has an amazing and vivid imagination…It’s like listening to the rantings of someone with a high fever: fascinating and scary.”—The Plain Dealer
“One of the year’s most provocative story collections.”—Interview
“Hudson tackles the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War. Hudson does for it what Tim O’Brien did for Vietnam—he’s upped the ante. Big time.”—Abercrombie and Fitch
“The stories are powerful indictments of the atrocities committed by both sides.”—St. Louis Post Dispatch
“Phantasmagorical events befall the soldiers in Dear Mr. President…a floridly violent and hallucinatory collection.”—Salon
“The stories offer the reader a sometimes absurdist, and almost always hallucinatory vision of war’s horrors and its aftermath. Accordingly they are required reading.”—The Richmond Times Dispatch
“This story collection about the first Gulf War is nothing short of stunning.”—The Dallas Morning News
“Breathtaking. . . . It’s Time O’Brien writing about Desert Storm instead of Vietnam. Plus you need to add a dollop of Vonnegut, Mailer, and Heller for black humor. This is great stuff—it’s a literary Dr. Strangelove.”—Cincinnati City Beat
"An important contribution to war literature, and certainly a talent to watch . . . If combat is changing, then so must war stories . . . Hudson's tales deliver their sad humanity in the mode of absurdity, and deep beneath the wordplay and high-jinks are plenty of smart satire and not a few tears."—Kirkus Reviews
“Powerful and bold. . . . The stories in Dear Mr. President depict the war against Iraq as chaotic and amoral, and soul destroying. And the surreal images and epistemological twists elevate the gory details to genuine significance.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead appeared just three years after the end of World War II; Don DeLillo's Libra was published almost 25 years after his protagonist, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot Kennedy; more recently, Gabe Hudson's Dear Mr. President became the first significant piece of Gulf-war fiction, 11 years later.”—Esquire
“(Hudson’s) harrowing, courageous, darkly humorous collection of stories about the Gulf War may very well prove to be the equal of Tim O'Brien's celebrated Vietnam collection, The Things They Carried. An impressive collection; enthusiastically recommended for all libraries.”—Library Journal