Meditations in Green, Stephen Wright
Meditations in Green, Stephen Wright
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Meditations in Green

Author: Stephen Wright

Narrator: Will Collyer

Unabridged: 12 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/07/2020

Synopsis

One of the greatest Vietnam War novels ever written, by an award-winning writer who experienced it firsthand.
Deployed to Vietnam with the U.S. Army's 1069 Intelligence Group, Spec. 4 James Griffin starts out clear-eyed and hardworking, believing he can glide through the war unharmed. But the kaleidoscope of horrors he experiences gets inside him relentlessly. He gradually collapses and ends up unstrung, in step with the exploding hell around him and waiting for the cataclysm that will bring him home, dead or not.
Griffin survives, but back in the U.S. his battles intensify. Beset by addiction, he takes up meditating on household plants and attempts to adjust to civilian life and beat back the insanity that threatens to overwhelm him.
Meditations in Green is a haunting exploration of the harrowing costs of war and yet-unhealed wounds, "the impact of an experience so devastating that words can hardly contain it" (Walter Kendrick, the New York Times Book Review). Through passages gorgeous, agonizing, and surreal, Stephen Wright paints a searing portrait of a nation driven to the brink by violence and deceit.

About Stephen Wright

Stephen Wright is a New York–based novelist known for his use of surrealistic imagery and dark comedy. His work has varied from hallucinatory accounts of war, a family drama among UFO cultists, a carnivalesque novel on a serial killer, to a Civil War picaresque. He has taught writing courses at various universities, including Princeton University, Brown University, and the New School.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Vit on July 15, 2023

War and its aftermath: the style of Meditations in Green is fancifully delirious and its narration is stark graphic… Trips struck the match with a cavalier flourish and attempted for the second time to start his first pipe of the day. Lungs wheezing like a pair of mildewed bellows, he sucked furious......more

Goodreads review by Jeff on December 19, 2023

Some of the best prose I've read about Vietnam. A sprawling collage of hallucinatory war scenes and scarifying sketches that feels like it was stitched together into a novel after the fact. The present day PTSD frame narrative is fascinating but under-nourished. Sometimes the lack of structure can b......more

Goodreads review by James on August 23, 2012

The man writes zero boring sentences. And I felt like I didn't breathe during the last 30 pages of this book.......more

Goodreads review by Tung on January 09, 2008

The book cover states that this book is regarded by many as the best book ever about the Vietnam War, and having read most of the works considered part of the canon of that era, I in no small measure agree with the statement. It is nothing short of brilliant. The story (like other works of that era)......more

Goodreads review by Alison on March 18, 2024

I'm not the aficionado of the massive heaps of art, literature, film and music left in the wake of the Vietnam War that some of my friends are . But this book and Robert Stone's "Dog Soldiers" transcend their peers on every possible level. Note: this book is not for the faint-hearted. Additionally,......more

Quotes

Praise for Meditations in Green (1983)

"Precisely that brutal hallucination we desperately wanted to end." --Don DeLillo

"The best that any fiction about this war has offered." --Newsweek

PRAISE FOR STEPHEN WRIGHT

M31: A Family Romance (1988)

"Beautiful and terrifying. . . . M31 offers a big, bold look at the American family. It takes us far away and very close to home. . . . Stephen Wright is a . . . bright star in the literary sky." --San Francisco Chronicle

"M31 is a devastatingly forceful accomplishment and reestablishes its author as a star of the first magnitude." --The Washington Post Book World

"Mr. Wright's sentences buzz like high-tension wires. I enjoyed reading every word of M31, literally." --Russell Banks

Going Native (1994)

"An astonishing novel." --Toni Morrison

The Amalgamation Polka (2007)

"An extravagantly talented novelist. . . . For Wright, America, past and present, is Wonderland, a place of marvels and horrors from which not even the fortunate escape with their heads. " --Laura Miller, The New York Times Book Review

"This dark and lyrical tale of madness and prophecy speaks uncannily from within its period, in the tradition of heartbroken humor, which America's lapses of faith in its own promise have always evoked in the finest of our storytellers, among whom Stephen Wright here honorably takes his place." --Thomas Pynchon

"Quite simply an astonishing novel, brilliantly executed and beautifully written. Stephen Wright deserves to be famous and feted for it."
--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Praise for Processed Cheese

"Processed Cheese does for consumerism what Catch-22 did for war."—Stephen King, bestselling author of IT and The Shining

"In novel after unsparing novel-each one gorgeous, too, and full of awe- Stephen Wright has emerged as a kind of modern-day Socrates hectoring a complacent citizenry to have a good hard look at its collective delusions. With Processed Cheese, he's written a novel so outrageous and diagnostic of our current ills, it will prove much stronger than hemlock. If you hope to keep up your venality, America, your cruelties, and your death wish, better string this court jester up by his toes."—Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party

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