[3][4] Powers's first novel The Yellow Birds, which drew on his experiences in the Iraq War, garnered a lucrative advance from publisher Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown.

[6] Wrote Kakutani: "At once a freshly imagined bildungsroman and a metaphysical parable about the loss of innocence and the uses of memory, it's a novel that will stand with Tim O'Brien's enduring Vietnam book, The Things They Carried (1990), as a classic of contemporary war fiction.

"[7] In an interview with The Guardian, Powers expounded his motivation for writing The Yellow Birds: "One of the reasons that I wrote this book was the idea that people kept saying: 'What was it like over there?'

Some chapters lack sufficient power, others labor under the influence of classic war stories, rather than arising organically from the author's unique vision.

"[12] The book has been adapted on screen in 2017, The Yellow Birds was directed by Alexandre Moors and starred Jack Huston, Alden Ehrenreich, Tye Sheridan and Jennifer Aniston.