water & power
by Steven Dunn

Novel | 5.25″x8″ | 180 pp. | Paperback | October 2018
Cover art by Jay Halsey.

Read excerpts in Granta Magazine Issue 142: Animalia & Issue 145: Ghosts

Navy veteran Steven Dunn’s second novel, water & power, plunges into military culture and engages with perceptions of heroism and terrorism. In this shifting landscape, deployments are feared, absurd bureaucracy is normalized, and service members are consecrated. water & power is a collage of voices, documents, and critical explorations that disrupt the usual frequency channels of military narratives.

water & power
by Steven Dunn

Novel | 5.25″x8″ | 180 pp. | Paperback | October 2018
Cover art by Jay Halsey.

Read excerpts in Granta Magazine Issue 142: Animalia & Issue 145: Ghosts

Navy veteran Steven Dunn’s second novel, water & power, plunges into military culture and engages with perceptions of heroism and terrorism. In this shifting landscape, deployments are feared, absurd bureaucracy is normalized, and service members are consecrated. water & power is a collage of voices, documents, and critical explorations that disrupt the usual frequency channels of military narratives.

Dunn’s remarkable talent for storytelling collapses the boundaries between poetry and prose, memoir and fiction. Dunn reveals, exacerbates, and speculates on the gargantuan mythology of a legendary branch of the American armed forces: The Navy. How is a superpower created and maintained? Who maintains it? What stories are told, buried or collected along the way — stories of survival, violence, duty and ethics? Among the interviews, photographs, and journal entries Dunn shows us an intimate portrait of power: like water, you are never quite sure who is claiming control beneath the surface. (Nikki Wallschlaeger) Dunn unrelentingly captures the difficult, funny, abject, exhilarating, heartbreaking and maddening aspects of Navy life, both on and off duty. Read this book and understand the veterans in your life better, understand the aggressive disconnection the armed forces demands, and retain a much clearer picture of the people who wear the uniform in America’s name — as who we are, complex and bold and conflicted and powerful and terrified and tough and human. (Khadijah Queen)

Dunn’s remarkable talent for storytelling collapses the boundaries between poetry and prose, memoir and fiction. Dunn reveals, exacerbates, and speculates on the gargantuan mythology of a legendary branch of the American armed forces: The Navy. How is a superpower created and maintained? Who maintains it? What stories are told, buried or collected along the way — stories of survival, violence, duty and ethics? Among the interviews, photographs, and journal entries Dunn shows us an intimate portrait of power: like water, you are never quite sure who is claiming control beneath the surface. (Nikki Wallschlaeger) Dunn unrelentingly captures the difficult, funny, abject, exhilarating, heartbreaking and maddening aspects of Navy life, both on and off duty. Read this book and understand the veterans in your life better, understand the aggressive disconnection the armed forces demands, and retain a much clearer picture of the people who wear the uniform in America’s name — as who we are, complex and bold and conflicted and powerful and terrified and tough and human. (Khadijah Queen)

About the Author

A 2021 Whiting Award winner, and shortlisted for Granta magazine’s “Best of Young American Novelists,” Steven Dunn is the author of two books from Tarpaulin Sky Press: water & power and Potted Meat, which was a co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and has been adapted for a short film entitled The Usual Route, from Foothills Productions. Steven was born and raised in West Virginia, and after 10 years in the Navy he earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from University of Denver.

About the Author

A 2021 Whiting Award winner, and shortlisted for Granta magazine’s “Best of Young American Novelists,” Steven Dunn is the author of two books from Tarpaulin Sky Press: water & power and Potted Meat, which was a co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and has been adapted for a short film entitled The Usual Route, from Foothills Productions. Steven was born and raised in West Virginia, and after 10 years in the Navy he earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from University of Denver.