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Cargando... Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012 original; edición 2012)por Ben Fountain (Autor)
Información de la obraBilly Lynn's Long Halftime Walk por Ben Fountain (2012)
   Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.  BIBLIOTECAZIZUR | Nov 25, 2016 | 
 Every two or three years, if I'm lucky, I get my hands on a novel that I simply can't shut up about, a novel I shout from my humble mountaintop to anyone who will listen, a novel that I hand-sell any time I have a literate audience of one or more. In many cases, I'll purchase this novel, over and over and over, and put it in the hands of readers....One novel this year blew the top of my head off like no other, and that was Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain.... No brow-beating, no navel gazing and no ranting. Just great storytelling, fully realized characters and sentences that crackle. In short, Fountain makes it look easy.  The novel is niftily postmodern, in that it deals with a heavily mediated reality. Bravo squad aren't even called Bravo squad, but that was what the "Fox embed" christened them. They hear their story being spun in real time: "Carl, what can I say?" says Albert, the movie producer, on the phone. "It's a war picture – not everybody gets out alive." The stadium is dominated by the huge "Jumbotron" screen; Billy wonders whether "maybe the game is just an ad for the ads". But Fountain, like better-known writers of his generation such as Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, has dragged this ironic, media-saturated style back in the direction of sincerity, with rich, sharply drawn characters that you care about. Beneath the dazzle, there's a story as old and simple as Kipling's poem "Tommy": "They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls, / But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!" 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. There’s hardly a false note, or even a slightly off-pitch one, in Fountain’s sympathetic, damning and structurally ambitious novel. (The whole story, with the exception of a flashback or two, takes place during the course of a single afternoon.) Billy and the other Bravos are, for the most part, uneducated, but they possess a rare intelligence that allows them to see things as they really are, which is not exactly the way the pro-war meme generators want Americans to see them. By the novel’s end, we’re forced to reassess what it means to “support the troops.” Does it simply mean letting them know they’re in our prayers as we send them back into battle and go about our business? Does it mean turning them into gaudy celebrities? Or could there perhaps be a more honorable and appropriately humble way to commemorate their service? “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” asks us to consider the uncomfortable possibility that we don’t really know the answer anymore. Pertenece a las series editorialesPremiosDistincionesListas de sobresalientes
Three minutes and forty-three seconds of intensive warfare with Iraqi insurgents--caught on tape by a 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 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. Over the course of the 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. The English-language edition was turned into a major motion picture in 2016. Los ocho supervivientes del escuadrón Bravo se enfrentan al último tramo del Tour de la Victoria, tras protagonizar en Irak una heroica hazaña bélica que se hizo viral en YouTube y enardeció el ánimo patriótico de todo un país. Después de dos semanas de baños de multitudes y de ser recibidos con pompa por el presidente Bush en la Casa Blanca, serán agasajados por la turba enfervorecida del Texas Stadium, en el corazón de la América más profunda y conservadora, dos días antes de volver al frente. El soldado raso Billy Lynn, de diecinueve años, héroe de la hazaña de Al Ansakar, en la que ha perdido a su mejor amigo, se debate entre la fascinación del ardor yanqui que suscita entre sus compatriotas y el terrorífico e inminente retorno a Irak. El multimillonario dueño de los Texas Cowboys, Norman Oglesby, será su maestro de ceremonias en esta recepción en la que compartirán escenario con Beyoncé y las Destiny's Child en el espectáculo de la media parte. En su viaje por las entrañas del American dream, los Bravo se cruzarán con magnates del petróleo, un productor de Hollywood que planea hacer una película con su historia protagonizada por Hilary Swank, cheerleaders neumáticas que cortan la respiración, jugadores de fútbol americano de dimensiones sobrehumanas y una plétora de fanáticos que vomitarán su fervor nacional sobre los atribulados soldados. La primera novela de Ben Fountain, ganadora del National Book Critics Circle Award y finalista del National Book Award, fue recibida con gran entusiasmo por crítica y lectores cuando se publicó en 2012, y se convirtió en un best seller. Con un lenguaje vigoroso, repleto de metáforas inolvidables propias del mejor Tom Wolfe, Fountain compone un feroz retrato de la reciente guerra de Irak y una sátira devastadora e hilarante del American way of life. En noviembre de 2016, se estrena la versión cinematográfica del libro, dirigida por el oscarizado Ang Lee y protagonizada por Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund, Vin Diesel, Steve Martin, y el debutante Joe Alwyn en el papel de Billy Lynn. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Debates activosNingunoCubiertas populares
 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (3.89)
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La primera novela de Ben Fountain, ganadora del National Book Critics Circle Award y finalista del National Book Award, fue recibida con gran entusiasmo por crítica y lectores cuando se publicó en 2012, y se convirtió en un best seller. Con un lenguaje vigoroso, repleto de metáforas inolvidables propias del mejor Tom Wolfe, Fountain compone un feroz retrato de la reciente guerra de Irak y una sátira devastadora e hilarante del American way of life.