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The Post-War Dream Reader’s Guide

By Mitch Cullin

The Post-War Dream by Mitch Cullin

READERS GUIDE

“Exacting, suspenseful, elegiac yet life-embracing.”
Los Angeles Times

The introduction, questions, and suggestions for further reading that follow are intended to enhance your reading of Mitch Cullin’s The Post-War Dream.

Introduction

Sixty-eight-year-old Hollis and his wife, Debra, have settled into their golden years in a gated community outside of Tucson, Arizona. Although they are devoted to each other, events that took place decades earlier, when Hollis fought in the Korean War, have left him with a deep-seated trauma-and with a secret he has never been able to share with his wife. As a reluctant Hollis revisits his past after his wife becomes dangerously ill, we see just how much the years of war changed his life forever. In rapturous prose, Cullin captures in The Post-War Dream the complexity of a marriage and the indelible force of the past on one man’s life.

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. Do you think that Hollis would suffer from the traumatic flashbacks of his time in the Korean War if he was not faced with his wife’s illness and probable death?

2. Why is it so important for Debra to have Hollis “tell [her] about us?” Do you think that each spouse has a different version of their story of courtship and marriage?

3. How does the recurring cycle of war in our country’s history affect each generation?

4. What constitutes a good marriage? Do Hollis and Debra have a good marriage?

5. Do you believe in chance? How did chance play a role in bringing Debra and Hollis together?

6. Do you fear loss? What do you consider worse: loss of love, hope, youth?

7. Do you consider Hollis’s life a dream or nightmare? How does memory affect each version?

About this Author

Mitch Cullin is the author of eight books, including A Slight Trick of the Mind, Tideland, and Branches, a novel-in-verse. He divides his time between California’s San Gabriel Valley and Tokyo, Japan, where in addition to writing fiction he collaborates on various projects with the artist Peter I. Chang.

Suggested Reading

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex; Ha Jin, War Trash; Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Alice Munro, The View From Castle Rock; Anthony Swofford, Jarhead; Philip Roth, Indignation; Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone; Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
 
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