The Prisoners of Quai Dong

New York: New American Library, 1967. First Edition. First Printing. 8vo. 22cm x 15cm. Publisher's black cloth. Dustjacket. Titled in silver gilt to spine, clean and sharp in a strong and bright example of the dustjacket, slight scuffing and edgewear. A near fine copy. 214pp. Internally clean. Highly controversial upon its publication, and asking a number of questions that its 1967 readers clearly weren't comfortable discovering the answers to, Kolpacoff's novel deals with a nightmarish situation in which a disgraced US soldier's refusal to fight lands him in a brutal prison camp. He is offered reinstatement if he participates in the interrogation and torture of a 17 year old Vietcong prisoner, in a claustrophobic jungle hut with four other men, all of whom possess varying reasons and motivations for being there, but who are all simply through association, equally damned. Kolpacoff was never in Vietnam, which seems immaterial to the main question posed by this, his first novel; it is not so much what we are doing to our enemies, but what are we doing to ourselves?