Why read The Smoking Mountain?

Book cover of The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Post-War Germany

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Smoking Mountain as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Ellen Feldman

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Perhaps the most sweeping view of the Occupation can be found in The Smoking Mountain by Kay Boyle. An editor at the New Yorker asked Boyle, who was in Germany under the Occupation, for a fictional account. While most of the short stories, except for the first which is clearly reportorial, work as fiction, they are grounded in her experiences in a fraught world where victors and vanquished, Germans and Americans, military and civilians struggle to find a way to coexist. In Boyle’s gimlet eye, few come out blameless.

From Ellen's list on The best books on the Allied Occupation of Germany.