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Roy Scranton

Biography

Roy Scranton

Roy Scranton is the author of LEARNING TO DIE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: Reflections on the End of a Civilization and I HEART OKLAHOMA, and co-editor of FIRE AND FORGET: Short Stories from the Long War. He grew up in Oregon, dropped out of college and spent several years wandering the American West. In 2002, he enlisted in the US Army. He served from 2002 to 2006, including a 14-month deployment to Iraq. After leaving the Army, he earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research, then completed his PhD in English at Princeton.

Roy Scranton

Books by Roy Scranton

I Heart Oklahoma!
by Roy Scranton - Fiction, Humor

When Suzie is offered the chance to work with a maverick cinematographer on his road-trip movie about Donald Trump’s America, she’s pretty sure it’s a bad idea. But she signs up anyway, hoping it might help her start over and find something she’s lost: a sense of the future. A provocative, genderqueer, shapeshifting musical romp through the brain-eating nightmare of contemporary America, I HEART OKLAHOMA! moves from our bleeding-edge present to a furious Faulknerian retelling of the Charlie Starkweather killings in the 1950s, capturing in its fragmented, mesmerizing form the violence at the heart of the American dream.

War Porn
by Roy Scranton - Fiction

In WAR PORN, three lives fit inside one another like nesting dolls: a restless young woman at an end-of-summer barbecue in Utah; an American soldier in occupied Baghdad; and Qasim al-Zabadi, an Iraqi math professor, who faces the US invasion of his country with fear, denial and perseverance. As the book cuts from America to Iraq and back again, as home and hell merge, we come to see America through the eyes of the occupied, even as we see Qasim become a prisoner of the occupation. Through the looking glass of WAR PORN, Roy Scranton reveals the fragile humanity that connects Americans and Iraqis, torturers and the tortured, victors and their victims.