China Wind

Redburn Press


China Wind is the first novel in Dan Guenther's lost Vietnam trilogy. The other novels in the series, Dodge City Blues and Townsend's Solitaire, are available from Redburn Press on Amazon.com. or BarnesAndNoble.com

Mark Kohut, Publisher, Redburn Press, February 2007

CHINA WIND
Dan Guenther - Redburn, ISBN 1-933704-01-2 —Trade, $14.95

"The brutal and compelling poetry of Dan Guenther's China Wind gives us a unique and unforgettable portrait of a war we long to forget, but can't. It is a subjective take on survival that I would liken to The Red Badge of Courage. The big picture that fascinates the higher-ups mean little to the men in Guenther's novel. They just want to get back home... China Wind deserves shelf space with the novels of Robert Stone and Tim O'Brien." — Ed Gorman, author of The Day the Music Died

"Dan Guenther's China Wind opens the kimono on America's longest and costliest war, a war we were totally unprepared to fight and finish. His grunt-level account is a running observation of a war we entered with virtually no understanding of its nature or complexity." — Bob Fischer, Colonel USMC (Ret.), former advisor to the Vietnamese Marine Corps, Lecturer on Strategy and Tactics of the Insurgent, Naval War College.

"China Wind is both luminous and illuminating. The writing is at once powerful, authentic, irreverent, comic, and, at times, shocking." — Dow Mossman, author of The Stones of Summer


The Colorado State University Libraries Special Collections - The Vietnam War Literature Archive:


Created in 1975, the Vietnam War Literature Collection contains imaginative accounts of Americans fighting in Vietnam. Included are fiction, plays, poetry, artists' sketches and miscellaneous works. Historical, political and autobiographical accounts as well as protest literature set outside the time or place of the Vietnam War are excluded. Holdings now amount to some four thousand items. Many works written during and after the war were issued by vanity presses, printed in short-lived journals or not published at all. Thus, identification and acquisition are challenging and still not complete. While searches for obscure items are always active, most sources for current additions to the collection are trade and mass market publishers.

Scholarly and critical studies of Vietnam War literature enhance the core collection and reflect the growing interest of academic researchers and popular writers. There are numerous individual reviews, journal articles, theses, dissertations and books. Many of them are based on work done at Colorado State University. As authors have learned about the collection, a number have contributed manuscripts, drafts, galley proofs and other unpublished material. All of this is available for perusal and research. In the novels, the most common perspective is that of a combat infantryman, and many stories cover a tour of duty.

Examples of these that are also notably well-written are Joe Haldeman's War Year, Charles Durden's No Bugles, No Drums and Dan Guenther's China Wind. Other novels feature such characters as nurses, professional officers, spies, reporters and the whole variety of persons who were involved in the war. Three have won National Book Awards. They are Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers (1974), Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato (1978) and Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story (1987). Robert Olen Butler's A Scent of Good Water was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Many short stories in the collection have been included in such anthologies as the O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. Please see the URL below to link with the CSU Special Collections: http://lib.colostate.edu/archives/vietlit.html