Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Author: Ben Fountain

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0062096826

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This award-winning satire shares a day in the life of a nineteen-year-old U.S. soldier home on leave from the Iraq War to take part in an NFL halftime show. A ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents at “the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal”—three minutes and forty-three seconds of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew—has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America’s most sought-after heroes. For the past two weeks, the Bush administration has sent them on a media-intensive nationwide Victory Tour to reinvigorate public support for the war. Now, on this chilly and rainy Thanksgiving, the Bravos are guests of America’s Team, the Dallas Cowboys, slated to be part of the halftime show alongside the superstar pop group Destiny’s Child. Among the Bravos is the Silver Star–winning hero of Al-Ansakar Canal, Specialist William Lynn, a nineteen-year-old Texas native. Amid clamoring patriots sporting flag pins on their lapels and Support Our Troops bumper stickers on their cars, the Bravos are thrust into the company of the Cowboys’ hard-nosed businessman/owner and his coterie of wealthy colleagues; a luscious born-again Cowboys cheerleader; a veteran Hollywood producer; and supersized pro players eager for a vicarious taste of war. Among these faces Billy sees those of his family—his worried sisters and broken father—and Shroom, the philosophical sergeant who opened Billy’s mind and died in his arms at Al-Ansakar. Over the course of this day, Billy will begin to understand difficult truths about himself, his country, his struggling family, and his brothers-in-arms—soldiers both dead and alive. In the final few hours before returning to Iraq, Billy will drink and brawl, yearn for home and mourn those missing, face a heart-wrenching decision, and discover pure love and a bitter wisdom far beyond his years . . . Poignant, riotously funny, and exquisitely heartbreaking, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a devastating portrait of our time, a searing and powerful novel that cements Ben Fountain’s reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation. Now a major motion picture directed by Ang Lee Praise for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk Finalist for the National Book Award Winner, National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction Winner, Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction “Brilliantly done . . . grand, intimate, and joyous.” —New York Times Book Review “The Catch-22 of the Iraq War.” —Karl Marlantes


Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Author: Ben Fountain

Publisher: Canongate Books

Published: 2012-07-05

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0857864394

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NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE BY OSCAR-WINNING DIRECTOR ANG LEE Billy Lynn is home from Iraq. And he's a YouTube sensation. Tonight, with the nation's eyes on him, Billy steps out onto the field at the Dallas Cowboys' Thanksgiving football game. Tomorrow, he must go back to war.


Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

Author: Ben Fountain

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-10-13

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0061847623

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Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award * A National Bestseller “An exceptional story collection.” —New York Times Book Review The well-intentioned protagonists of Brief Encounters with Che Guevera—including a disillusioned NGO worker, the wife of a special operations officer, and an obssessed ornithologist—are caught, to both disastrous and hilarious effect, in the maelstrom of political and social upheaval surrounding them. With masterful pacing and a robust sense of the absurd, each story is a self-contained adventure, steeped in the heady mix of tragedy and danger, excitement and hope, that characterizes countries in transition. An intelligent and keenly observed collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevera marks the arrival of a striking and resonant new voice that speaks adeptly to the intimate connection between the foreign, the familiar, and the inescapably human.


Beautiful Country Burn Again

Beautiful Country Burn Again

Author: Ben Fountain

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2018-09-25

Total Pages: 808

ISBN-13: 0062688766

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In a sweeping work of reportage set over the course of 2016, New York Times bestselling author Ben Fountain recounts a surreal year of politics and an exploration of the third American existential crisis Twice before in its history, the United States has been faced with a crisis so severe it was forced to reinvent itself in order to survive: first, the struggle over slavery, culminating in the Civil War, and the second, the Great Depression, which led to President Roosevelt’s New Deal and the establishment of America as a social-democratic state. In a sequence of essays that excavate the past while laying bare the political upheaval of 2016, Ben Fountain argues that the United States may be facing a third existential crisis, one that will require a “burning” of the old order as America attempts to remake itself. Beautiful Country Burn Again narrates a shocking year in American politics, moving from the early days of the Iowa Caucus to the crystalizing moments of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and culminating in the aftershocks of the weeks following election night. Along the way, Fountain probes deeply into history, illuminating the forces and watershed moments of the past that mirror and precipitated the present, from the hollowed-out notion of the American Dream, to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, to our weaponized new conception of American exceptionalism, to the cult of celebrity that gave rise to Donald Trump. In an urgent and deeply incisive voice, Ben Fountain has fused history and the present day to paint a startling portrait of the state of our nation. Beautiful Country Burn Again is a searing indictment of how we came to this point, and where we may be headed.


Afterwar

Afterwar

Author: Nancy Sherman

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0199325278

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Drawing on in-depth interviews with service women and men, Nancy Sherman weaves narrative with a philosophical and psychological analysis of the moral and emotional attitudes at the heart of the afterwars. Afterwar offers no easy answers for reintegration. It insists that we widen the scope of veteran outreach to engaged, one-on-one relationships with veterans.


These Boys and Their Fathers

These Boys and Their Fathers

Author: Don Waters

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1609386795

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In 2010, Don Waters set out to write a magazine story about a surfing icon who had known his absentee father. It was an attempt to find a way of connecting to a man he never knew. He didn’t imagine that the story would become a years-long quest to understand a man who left behind almost nothing except for a self-absorbed autobiography for his abandoned son. These Boys and Their Fathers touches on Waters’s early life with his single mother—and her string of dysfunctional men—and his later search for and encounters with his father, but it quickly expands into a gripping account of the life of a 1930s pulp writer, also named Don Waters, with whom Waters becomes obsessed. This wildly original book blends memoir, investigative reporting, and fiction to sort out difficult aspects of family, masculinity, and what it means to be a father.


Slow Getting Up

Slow Getting Up

Author: Nate Jackson

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2014-09-02

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0062383213

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One man's odyssey into the brutal hive of the National Football League As an unsigned free agent who rose through the practice squad to the starting lineup of the Denver Broncos, Nate Jackson took the path of thousands of unknowns before him to carve out a professional football career twice as long as the average player. Through his story recounted here—from scouting combines to preseason cuts to byzantine film studies to glorious touchdown catches—even knowledgeable football fans will glean a new, starkly humanized understanding of the NFL's workweek. Fast-paced, lyrical, dirty, and hilariously unvarnished, Slow Getting Up is an unforgettable look at the real lives of America's best athletes putting their bodies and minds through hell.


Cinemachines

Cinemachines

Author: Garrett Stewart

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-04-21

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 022665673X

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The hero stands on stage in high-definition 3-D while doubled on a crude pixel screen in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Alien ships leave Earth by dissolving at the conclusion of Arrival. An illusory death spiral in Vertigo transitions abruptly to a studio set, jolting the spectator. These are a few of the startling visual moments that Garrett Stewart examines in Cinemachines, a compelling, powerful, and witty book about the cultural and mechanical apparatuses that underlie modern cinema. Engaging in fresh ways with revelatory special effects in the history of cinematic storytelling—from Buster Keaton’s breaching of the film screen in Sherlock Jr. to the pixel disintegration of a remotely projected hologram in Blade Runner 2049—Stewart’s book puts unprecedented emphasis on technique in moving image narrative. Complicating and revising the discourse on historical screen processes, Cinemachines will be crucial reading for anyone interested in the evolution of the movies from a celluloid to a digital medium.


One Good Mama Bone

One Good Mama Bone

Author: Bren McClain

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2017-02-14

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1611177472

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A mama cow’s devotion to her calf provides lessons in motherhood to a poor Southern woman in this novel of family, survival, and human-animal bonds. South Carolina, 1950s. Homemaker Sarah Creamer has been left to care for young Emerson Bridge, the product of an affair between Sarah’s husband and her best friend. But beyond the deep wound of their betrayal, Sarah is daunted by the prophecy of her mother’s words, seared in her memory since childhood: “You ain’t got you one good mama bone in you, girl.” When Sarah finds Emerson a steer to compete at an upcoming cattle show, the young calf cries in distress on her farm. Miles away, his mother breaks out of a barbed-wire fence to find him. When Sarah finds the young steer contently nursing a large cow, her education in motherhood begins. But Luther Dobbins is desperate to regain his championship cattle dynasty, and he will stop at nothing to win. Emboldened by her budding mama bone, Sarah is committed to victory even after she learns the winning steer’s ultimate fate. Will she too stop at nothing, even if it means betraying her teacher? One Good Mama Bone explores the strengths and limitations of parental love and the ethical dilemmas of raising animals for food.


Sheriff of Babylon Vol. 1: Bang. Bang. Bang.

Sheriff of Babylon Vol. 1: Bang. Bang. Bang.

Author: Tom King

Publisher: Vertigo

Published: 2016-07-19

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1401270611

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Baghdad, 2003. The reign of Saddam Hussein is over. The Americans are in command. And no one is in control. Former cop turned military contractor Christopher Henry knows that better than anyone. He’s in the country to train up a new Iraqi police force, and one of his recruits has just been murdered. With civil authority in tatters and dead bodies clogging the streets, Chris is the only person in the Green Zone with any interest in finding out who killed him-and why. Chris’ inquiry brings him first to Sofia, an American-raised Iraqi who now sits on the governing council, and then to Nassir, a grizzled veteran of Saddam’s police force-and probably the last real investigator left in Baghdad. United by death but divided by conflicting loyalties, the three must help each other navigate the treacherous landscape of post-invasion Iraq in order to hunt down the killers. But are their efforts really serving justice-or a much darker agenda? Inspired by his real-life experiences as a CIA operations officer in Iraq, writer Tom King (BATMAN) teams with artist Mitch Gerads to deliver a wartime crime thriller like no other in THE SHERIFF OF BABYLON VOL. 1: BANG. BANG. BANG., collecting issues #1-6 of their groundbreaking Vertigo series.