Matt Young holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University and is the recipient of fellowships with Words After War and the Carey Institute for Global Good. His work can be found in Tin House, Word Riot, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is a combat veteran, and lives in Olympia, Washington, where he teaches composition.

@young_em_see

A gut-wrenching, beautiful memoir which explores toxic masculinity and the devastating consequences of war on one impressionable young soldier

Matt Young joined the Marine Corps aged eighteen, after a drunken night that culminated in him crashing his car into a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases of California. Young survived training and then three deployments to Iraq as an infantryman.

Eat the Apple is the searing and honest response to those years. Visceral, ironic, self-lacerating and ultimately redemptive, Young's story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the vulnerability of those on the front lines and the true, if often misguided, motivations that drove a young man to a life at war.

Tender and brilliantly written, Eat the Apple is a powerful coming-of-age story that explores toxic masculinity and maps the insane geography of our times.

Raw and powerful . It's strictly categorised as a memoir, but Young attempts something much more formally daring . Remarkable

Inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining

Here he narrates with cold distance, there he is close and grisly. Some pages are tender and wistful, others repulsive, still others funny. The experimental, jagged account matches the disjointed life of the soldier . In writing about war, [Young] has found a purpose and his voice

In his fever dream of a narrative, images shift in and out of focus, forming a collage of death, excitement, vulgarity, friendship, boredom and humour, which is war itself . Eat the Apple is, essentially, a coming-of-age story, one about reckoning with the dissolution of youthful ideals, even when those ideals are as repugnant as a desire to kill another person to prove your own worth. Armies have always been populated by young men and women in search of this type of validation, but few have been able to write about it

Matt Young has written the Iliad of the Iraq war - searing as the desert sun, powerful as a rocket-propelled grenade ... This book will strengthen your heart and soul

Uncompromising. Page after page slices close to the bone with both stylistic and structural swagger

By turns hilarious and wrenching - and shot through with moments of piercing wisdom - Eat the Apple casts a kind of hypnotic spell that holds the reader until the last page ... Read this book

A standout ... Fresh, invigorating, and brutally honest in a scorched-earth kind of way. Eat the Apple scrapes the landscape of memory raw until it bleeds, and that's what puts it head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd