Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk - Softcover

Fountain, Ben

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062644025 ISBN 13: 9780062644022

Publisher: Ecco Press, 2016

Synopsis

New York Times Bestseller
Now a Major Motion Picture

"Brilliantly done . . . grand, intimate, and joyous."
--New York Times Book Review

"Mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters: read this giant-hearted novel."
--MARIA SEMPLE, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Three minutes and forty-three seconds of intensive warfare with Iraqi insurgents--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. Now they're on a media-intensive nationwide tour to reinvigorate public support for the war. On this rainy Thanksgiving Day, the Bravos are guests of a Dallas football team, slated to be part of the halftime show.

Among the Bravos is nineteen-year-old Specialist Billy Lynn. Surrounded by patriots sporting flag pins on their lapels and support our troops bumper stickers, he is thrust into the company of the team's owner and his coterie of wealthy colleagues; a born-again cheerleader; a veteran Hollywood producer; and supersized players eager for a vicarious taste of war. Over the course of this day, 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 searing and powerful novel that has cemented Ben Fountain's reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation.

About this title

Review:

"[An] inspired, blistering war novel...Though it covers only a few hours, the book is a gripping, eloquent provocation. Class, privilege, power, politics, sex, commerce and the life-or-death dynamics of battle all figure in Billy Lynn's surreal game day experience."--New York Times

"Fountain's excellent first novel follows a group of soldiers at a Dallas Cowboys game on Thanksgiving Day...Through the eyes of the titular soldier, Fountain creates a minutely observed portrait of a society with woefully misplaced priorities. [Fountain has] a pitch-perfect ear for American talk..."--The New Yorker

"Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a big one. This is the brush-clearing Bush book we've been waiting for."--Harper's Magazine

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is not merely good; it's Pulitzer Prize-quality good . . . A bracing, fearless and uproarious satire of how contemporary war is waged and sold to the American public."--San Francisco Chronicle

"A masterful echo of 'Catch-22, ' with war in Iraq at the center. ...a gut-punch of a debut novel...There's hardly a false note, or even a slightly off-pitch one, in Fountain's sympathetic, damning and structurally ambitious novel."--Washington Post

"Brilliantly done . . . grand, intimate, and joyous."--New York Times Book Review

"For Memorial Day why not turn to a biting, thoughtful, and absolutely spot-on new novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk...This postmodern swirl of inner substance, yellow ribbons, and good(ish) intentions is at the core of Ben Fountain's brilliant Bush-era novel."--The Daily Beast

"Ben Fountain combines blistering, beautiful language with razor-sharp insight...and has written a funny novel that provides skewering critiques of America's obsession with sports, spectacle, and war."--Huffington Post

"A brilliantly conceived first novel . . . The irony, sorrow, anger and examples of cognitive dissonance that suffuse this novel make it one of the most moving and remarkable novels I've ever read."--Nancy Pearl, NPR, Morning Edition

"Seething, brutally funny...[Fountain] leaves readers with a fully realized band of brothers...Fountain's readers will never look at an NFL Sunday, or at America, in quite the same way."--Sports Illustrated

Book Description:

A new edition to tie in with Oscar-winning director Ang Lee's film adaptation

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0062644025
• ISBN 13: 9780062644022
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336