Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Outerbridge Reach (LOA #328) (Library of America, 328)

For the first time in one volume, three modern masterworks from the National Book Award-winning writer who explored the dark undercurrents of the American Century

Blurring the boundaries between literary fiction and political and military thrillers, Robert Stone was one of the most dynamic and critically acclaimed American writers of the last fifty years. Here, released in conjunction with Madison Smartt Bell's major new biography, is a deluxe edition gathering Stone's three finest novels, modern masterpieces about the dark underside of the American century. Stone's own experiences in Saigon inspired Dog Soldiers (1974), in which an ill-fated scheme to smuggle three kilos of heroin from South Vietnam to California comes to the attention of a corrupt drug enforcement official, setting in motion a lethal chase across a nightmarish landscape populated by poseurs, hustlers, psychopathic criminals, and failed gurus. Winner of the National Book Award, Dog Soldiers ranks with the work of Michael Herr and Tim O'Brien as a psychological reckoning with how Vietnam changed America. A Flag for Sunrise (1981) depicts of a leftist revolution in the fictious Central American country of Tecan and its impact on three North Americans: Justin Feeney, an idealistic nun; Frank Holliwell, an anthropologist who does favors for the CIA; and Pablo Tabor, an enraged Coast Guard deserter. Through their fates Stone explores the search for moral order in a terrifying universe beset by fear and evil. In Outerbridge Reach (1992) Owen Browne, a Navy veteran of Vietnam turned boat salesman, seeks to test his courage amid the materialism, corruption, and superficiality of 1980s America by entering a solo around-the-world yacht race. Alone in the South Atlantic, Browne discovers his capacity for deception and enlightenment in a sea tale worthy of Melville and Conrad.