Friday, January 17, 2014

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers and Falcons on the Floor

A literary critic and professor at SUNY Buffalo is writing an article contrasting The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers and my novel Falcons on the Floor. The Yellow Birds is a well respected novel with multiple awards and it was put out by a large publisher. It was short listed for the National Book Award and it got the PEN/Hemingway prize along with The Guardian's First Book Prize. Authors like Tom Wolf blurbed it. It has over 11,000 ratings on Goodreads. 



On the other hand, a small press published Falcons on the Floor. It had no agent or publicist. All the promotions were done by Adam Robinson or me. Although it got a lot of praise by magazines and journals and even Dahr Jamail (Al Jazeera producer and author of Beyond the Green Zone) and Alphonso Lingis. It received no prizes. Compared to The Yellow Birds, almost no one outside the indie lit community read Falcons on the Floor



From what I know of the article, it's pretty critical of The Yellow Birds. I'm curious to see what it says not just about the novels, but about Kevin Powers who is also a poet. I know these are two very different novels, but they do have similar motives.  


1 comment:

suggested Dallas Divorce Attorney Engle Law Group said...

This novel will live on. It is not forgetable! It cannot be classified as a war story or a coming of age story. It's a treatise against war, but not a sententious one. Read it and wonder how anyone in combat ever comes home undamaged.

There is just nothing wrong with this novel from a literary standpoint--only from a war standpoint.