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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 29/06/2026

Shocked and grateful my book made this summer reading list:

Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 21/04/2026

“Through his vivid, voice-driven prose, Strickland mingles societal crises and systemic obstacles with his characters’ attempts at personal survival or redemption.” So grateful for this considerate and smart review of A History of Heartache: chapter16.org/ghosts-of-a-...

Chapter 16 review of A History of Heartache:

“The world depicted in Patrick Strickland’s debut story collection, A History of Heartache, is thick with undercurrents of personal violence, addiction, cynicism, and economic instability. Jobs are scarce and menial. Drugs are abundant. Parents slosh their wine and whiskey. Kids get high and play too rough.

Through his vivid, voice-driven prose, Strickland mingles societal crises and systemic obstacles with his characters’ attempts at personal survival or redemption. Strickland’s stories persistently braid these elements together as they work to generate the stories’ thematic power.”

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 22/03/2026

I have a new piece up @tomdispatch.bsky.social about Trump’s promise to “help” Iranians, the brutal US-Israeli war on Iran, and the long history of imperial offers of aid that are so often deadly for the very people Washington says it wants to help: tomdispatch.com/why-donald-t...

Why Donald Trump Just Can’t Stop Going to War

When Imperial America Offers Help, It Just Might Get You Killed

BY PATRICK STRICKLAND

After protests across Iran turned deadly in January, President Donald Trump promised Iranians that “help is on the way.” On February 28th, the U.S. and Israel launched what immediately became a devastating war on Iran. American and Israeli warplanes began dropping bombs on a country of some 93 million people. Trump soon put out a video address, telling Iranians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” Around the time that video appeared, Iranians in the city of Minab were sorting through the corpses of more than 165 people killed in an airstrike on an elementary school for girls.

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 28/02/2026

I am downright stoked to get such a generous and positive review from Publishers Weekly for this story collection I’ve spent six, seven years chipping away at. ‘A History of Heartache’ is out April 21 with @melvillehouse.bsky.social — www.publishersweekly.com/9781685892357

Stories of addiction and underemployment feature in the bare-knuckled fiction debut from journalist Strickland (You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave). The unnamed narrator of the title entry, a high school senior, dreams about heading to California from his hometown in north Texas, leaving behind his alcoholic mother and memories of his older brother who died at age 16 from a heroin overdose. In “Mockingbirds,” a former teacher, now mopping floors at an abortion clinic, is hounded by an anti-abortion protester intent on making him into a villain online. In “Rent Money,” a woman in her early 20s comes to terms with the shortcomings of her 41-year-old husband, a heavy-drinking slumlord for “meth monsters” who tries to goad her into collecting rent, a far cry from the “clean, simple life” he promised her when they got married five years earlier. Strickland laces his hardscrabble scenes with lyricism, as in “Screaming East on I-10,” when a young drifter living alongside crack addicts describes taking a hit of the drug, then notices how “night bruises the sky purple.” In each piece, grief underscores the characters’ recklessness, imbuing the collection with an unsentimental but tender emotional register. Strickland’s humane depictions of people living on the margins acknowledge the forces that shape them.

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 01/01/2026

My debut fiction book, a short story collection called ‘A History of Heartache,’ comes out with @melvillehouse.bsky.social this April. It’s available for preorder now. It has 14 loosely linked stories connected to North Texas about coming up strange in a strange place. mhpbooks.com/books/a-hist...

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 11/10/2025

Just entirely normal unbiased independent journalists who hate political violence at the White House doing the normal thing journalism work of calling for the government to destroy people with whom they disagree

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 18/04/2025

Really stoked that I got to launch YOU CAN KILL EACH OTHER AFTER I LEAVE at @deepvellumbooks.bsky.social w/ @stevanzetti.bsky.social and a great discussion of fascism and borders, plus had a great turnout this week at the University of North Texas. Order: bookshop.org/p/books/you-...

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 14/04/2025

My new book made it onto a list of newly published titles in yesterday’s print version of the NY Times Book Review. YOU CAN KILL EACH OTHER AFTER I LEAVE ( @melvillehouse.bsky.social ), my years-long look at the Greek far right & the refugee crisis, is out tomorrow. mhpbooks.com/books/you-ca...

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 17/02/2025

JD Vance's Munich speech reached its audience. Here, the currently imprisoned Ilias Kasidiaris, a former parliamentarian with the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, seems to take Vance's comments to heart. He says Vance called out EU "rodents" for "undemocratic blockades of nationalist parties."

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 31/12/2024

This morning, the watchdog Alarm Phone (@alarmphone.bsky.social) reported on X an apparent pushback of a refugee boat by the Greek coast guard near Pasas island. As of Monday, UNHCR says 61,480 people have reached Greece this year.

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 09/12/2024

And Germany is already, almost immediately, hoping to use the occasion to deny Syrian asylum applications and ramp up deportations to Syria.

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 09/12/2024

Really grateful to have a short story I wrote included in the new issue of Epiphany alongside so many great pieces

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 09/12/2024

North of the main town, there is a cemetery that has a small section for refugees & migrants. The first time I went there in 2016 (1st photo), there were only a handful of graves for people who drowned in the Aegean. Now there are several dozens, including many for small children (2nd photo).

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 09/12/2024

Per EfSyn, camp authorities have forbade these residents sleeping outside from making tents to protect against increasingly cold winter weather. In early 2020, thousands at Vial were sleeping outside (photo), and they endured harassment as local tensions spiked. But arrivals are up once again…

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 03/12/2024

With the recent escalation in fighting in Syria, it’ll be extremely telling if EU leaders continue the campaign to designate it a safe country and move forward with the push to deport refugees there

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 29/11/2024

And if you were especially generous, you could order my last book, about US border militias and titled "The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands," also at 30% off until Monday. mhpbooks.com/books/the-ma...

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 29/11/2024

With early (and much appreciated) praise from @shaneburley.bsky.social, @mollycrabapple.bsky.social, and Antony Loewenstein:

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 29/11/2024

As part of @melvillehouse.bsky.social's flash sale, you can preorder my book, "You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism, and Bloodshed in Greece," for 30% off until Monday. Preorders help a lot, and this book has nine years of reporting in it. mhpbooks.com/books/you-ca...

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 17/11/2024

Elsewhere on campus, graffiti of the anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, murder by the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party in September 2013.

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 17/11/2024

The Polytechnic campus, Friday night, as the early comers paid homage to the students the junta killed in November 1973.

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 17/11/2024

A motorcade of Pakistani food delivery drivers joined the Polytechnic march to commemorate the 1973 student uprising. In the front was the brother of Muhammad Kamran Ashiq, whose brother died in an Athens police station in September.

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 17/11/2024

“Resist fascism forever,” read the banner in the front as the march moved toward the US and Israeli embassies

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Patrick Strickland @patrickobrienstrickland.com · 17/11/2024

Today, at the 51st anniversary of the 1973 Polytechnic student uprising, the former exiles and political prisoners of Greece’s military junta led the march chanting, “Freedom to Palestine.”

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