Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a big one. This is the brush-clearing Bush book we’ve been waiting for.”

  — Harper’s

• “The best book about the Iraq War and Destiny’s Child that you’ll ever read.”

  — Entertainment Weekly

• “It’s a darkly humorous satire about the war at home, absurd and believable at the same time.”

  — Esquire

• “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

• “The Iraq war hasn’t yet had its Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse-Five, but Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a contender…A wicked sense of humor, wonderful writing, and, beneath the anger and outrage, a generous heart.”

  — Tampa Bay Times

• “While Fountain undoubtedly knows his Graham Greene and Paul Theroux, his excursions into foreign infernos have an innocence all their own. In between his nihilistic descriptions, a boyishness keeps peeking out, cracking one-liners, and admiring the amazing if benighted scenery.”

  — Cleveland Plain Dealer

• “Fountain’s strength as a writer is that he not only can conjure up this all-too-realistic-sounding mob, but also the young believably innocent soul for our times, Specialist Billy Lynn. And from the first page I found myself rooting for him, often from the edge of my seat.”

  — Minneapolis Star Tribune

• “Darkly comic…Rarely does such a ruminative novel close with such momentum.”

  — Los Angeles Times

• “A masterful gut-punch of a debut novel…Catch-22 is about to be updated for a new era. In his immortal classic, Heller was lampooning the military’s attempt to bureaucratize the horror of World War II. In Fountain’s razor-sharp, darkly comic novel—a worthy neighbor to Catch-22 on the bookshelf of war fiction—the focus has shifted from bureaucracy to publicity, reflecting corresponding shifts in our culture…There’s hardly a false note, or even a slightly off-pitch one, in Fountain’s sympathetic, damning, and structurally ambitious novel.”

  — Washington Post

• “Biting, thoughtful, and absolutely spot-on…This postmodern swirl of inner substance, yellow ribbons, and good(ish) intentions is at the core of Ben Fountain’s brilliant Bush-era novel.”

  — Daily Beast

• “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

• “Employing intricate detail and feverish cinematography, Fountain’s vividly written novel is an allegorical hero’s journey, a descent into madness, and a mirror held up to this society’s high-definition TV reality. Tragically unhinged, it also rings completely, hilariously true.”

  — Library Journal

• “[An] inspired, blistering war novel…Mr. Fountain…sets up this Thanksgiving game as an artfully detailed microcosm of America in general, and George W. Bush’s Texas in particular, during the Iraq war. 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

• “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

• “Though the shellshocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war…War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)