'Youngblood': An Iraq War Veteran on His Striking Fiction Debut

I met Matt Gallagher in Brookfield Place, a glittering cathedral to globalized capitalism in downtown Manhattan. "Kiss from a Rose" pumps softly through hidden speakers in the ceiling, and you could kneel at the altars of Equinox, Umami Burger, and Prada in quick succession, if you wanted to. Its indoor palm court could be in Dubai or Beverly Hills—it was a bizarrely fitting place to discuss Gallagher's debut novel Youngblood, which is set during the final chapters of the Iraq War, in an isolated town trying to recover from the devastation. Gallagher is a veteran of the war himself, who returned home with a viral blog turned nonfiction book, Kaboom, and planned to get an MFA at Columbia and write a novel. The product of that work is Youngblood, part love story, part mystery, and part war chronicle that has had reviewers praising Gallagher’s ability to vividly recreate the life of an American soldier, both the banal and the unavoidably dramatic.