From our Thursday May 3rd email :
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (Friday May 4th
at 7:00)
You’ll be hearing lots of great things about this brand new
novel, and all of it is going to be true. Billy Lynn’s army squad become
instant heroes/celebrities when their intense Iraq War firefight gets caught on
tape by an embedded Fox News crew. The squad is brought home for a “Victory
Tour,” and this amazing, no-holds-barred novel opens on Thanksgiving Day with
the boys piling into a stretch limo, guests of America’s Team (a.k.a. the
Dallas Cowboys), on their way to be part of a halftime show with Destiny’s
Child. Along for the ride is a Hollywood
producer who is trying to broker the squad’s story into a movie deal. The rest
of the cast of characters includes patriotic fans, mammoth football players,
the Cowboy’s wealthy businessman/owner and his friends, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader,
and the ghost of one of the members of the squad who died in the firefight.
This is an incredible book. Madison Scott Bell has called it
“as close to the Great American novel as anyone is likely to come these days.”
And Karl Marlantes, the author of Matterhorn and What
it is Like to Go to War, has this to say about Billy Lynn:
“This book will be the Catch-22 of the Iraq War....This
funny, yet totally sobering dissection of the American way of watching war
will have you squirming at the same time you are laughing out loud; Fountain
applies the heat of his wicked sense of humor while you face the truth of who
we have become. Live one day inside Billy Lynn’s head and you’ll never again
see our soldiers or America
in the same way.”
Ben
Fountain reads here Friday evening at 7:00.
No comments:
Post a Comment