This chapter sets out to explore the potential decolonial politics at stake in two recent novels by Edna O’Brien and Colum McCann. These novels, set outside Ireland (in Palestine and Israel in the case of McCann and Nigeria in the case of O’Brien), raise uncomfortable questions about interculturality, empathy, and the notion of care. My central consideration is whether these well-meaning narratives of the fallout from violence and conflict in turn produce a form of epistemic violence which belies the poetics of care they strive so hard to foreground. Ultimately, I contend that notwithstanding these authors’ evident wish to foster empathy, their novels potentially function as aesthetic smokescreens, dissimulating structural inequalities on a local, national, and global scale, and indulging in a depoliticized form of interculturality which impedes a robust criticism of coloniality.

This chapter examines the origins and development of the “War Story” as a subgenre of American short fiction. It argues that the “War Story” evolved out of the Civil War and the subsequent flowering of realism, which influenced this subgenre both stylistically and philosophically. This chapter explores the major iterations of the “War Story” and documents its adaptation by writers such as Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Tim O’Brien.

Eight senior advisors were members of Trump’s Team specifically as it pertained to the pandemic. Each was in some way directly and heavily involved in how the president managed/mismanaged America’s worst public health crisis in over a century. Discussed in the chapter are senior advisor, Jared Kushner; chiefs of staff Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows; assistant to the president Peter Navarro; national security advisor Robert O’Brien and his deputy Matthew Pottinger; and counselors to the president Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks. During the coronavirus crisis, each of these advisors, like everyone else named in Part III of the book, prioritized the president’s political interest over the national interest.