Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
10 best books like Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Ben Fountain): The Underground Railroad, Building Stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Where'd You Go, Bernadette, The Yellow Birds, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East, Absolution, Running the Rift, Telegraph Avenue, Canada
| Author | Colson Whitehead |
| ISBN | 0385542364 |
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad,...
| Author | Chris Ware |
| ISBN | 0375424334 |
After years of sporadic work on other books and projects and following the almost complete loss of his virility, it's here: a new graphic novel by Chris Ware.
Building Stories imagines the inhabitants of a three-story Chicago apartment building: a 30-something woman who has yet to find...
| Author | Nathan Englander |
| ISBN | 0307958701 |
These eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction.
...
| Author | Maria Semple |
| ISBN | 0316204277 |
Bernadette Fox has vanished.
When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox...
| Author | Kevin Powers |
| ISBN | 0316219363 |
With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel about the costs of war that is destined to become a classic.
"The war tried to kill us in the spring," begins this breathtaking account of friendship...
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
| Author | Anthony Shadid |
| ISBN | 0547134665 |
“Evocative and beautifully written, House of Stone . . . should be read by anyone who wishes to understand the agonies and hopes of the Middle East.” — Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and author of Crossing Mandelbaum Gate
“In rebuilding his family home in southern Lebanon,...
| Author | Patrick Flanery |
| ISBN | 0307401278 |
In this stunning literary debut, Patrick Flanery delivers a devastating and intimate portrait of post-apartheid South Africa, and the perils of taking sides when the sides are changing around you.
Told in shifting perspectives, Absolution is centred on the mysterious character of Clare...
| Author | Naomi Benaron |
| ISBN | 1616201940 |
Running the Rift follows Jean Patrick Nkuba, a gifted Rwandan boy, from the day he knows that running will be his life to the moment he must run to save his life, a ten-year span in which his country is undone by the Hutu-Tutsi tensions. Born a Tutsi, he is thrust into a world where it's impossible to stay apolitical...
| Author | Michael Chabon |
| ISBN | 0061493341 |
Telegraph Avenue is the great American novel we've been waiting for. Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet.
As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there - longtime...
| Author | Richard Ford |
| ISBN | 0061692042 |
"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later."
When fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold...
| Author | David Finkel |
| ISBN | 0374165734 |
It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it the surge. “Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences,” he told...
| Author | Edith Pearlman |
| ISBN | 0982338295 |
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
PEN/MALAMUD AWARD
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
THE STORY PRIZE FINALIST
LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST
In this sumptuous offering, one of our premier storytellers provides a feast for fiction...
| Author | Pat Barker |
| ISBN | 0385524366 |
From Booker Prize winner Pat Barker, a masterful novel that portrays the staggering human cost of the Great War. Admirers of her Regeneration Trilogy as well as fans of Downton Abbey and War Horse
will be enthralled.
With Toby’s Room, a sequel to her widely praised previous novel Life...
| Author | Phil Klay |
| ISBN | 1594204993 |
Phil Klay's Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these...
| Author | Christopher Tilghman |
| ISBN | 0374203482 |
A masterful novel that confronts the dilemmas of race, family, and forbidden love in the wake of America's Civil War
Fifteen years after the publication of his acclaimed novel Mason's Retreat, Christopher Tilghman returns to the Mason family and the Chesapeake Bay in The Right-Hand Shore.
It...
| Author | Stephen Dau |
| ISBN | 0399158456 |
An exceptional debut novel about a young Muslim war orphan whose family is killed in a military operation gone wrong, and the American soldier to whom his fate, and survival, is bound.
Jonas is fifteen when his family is killed during an errant U.S. military operation in an unnamed Muslim country....
| Author | Miles Klee |
| ISBN | 1935928619 |
Populated by a bumbling, murderous citizenry of corrupt cops, innocents, ravenous addicts, lovesick geniuses, and cynical adventurers, Ivyland operates in the shadow of a giant pharmaceutical corporation that thrives on people's weaknesses...and may have an even more sinister agenda. It's...
| Author | David Abrams |
| ISBN | 0802120326 |
Fobbit \’fä-bit\, noun. Definition: A U.S. soldier stationed at a Forward Operating Base who avoids combat by remaining at the base, esp. during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2011). Pejorative.
In the satirical tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, Fobbit takes us into the chaotic world...
Honored as one of the "100 Notable Books of 2012" by The New York Times Book Review"The poems in On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths are taut, lucid, lyric, filled with complex emotional reflection while avoiding the usual difficulties of highbrow poetry."—New York Times Book Review
"Perillo...
| Author | Roxana Robinson |
| ISBN | 0374709572 |
Going from peace to war can make a young man into a warrior. Going from war to peace can destroy him.
Conrad Farrell has no family military heritage, but as a classics major at Williams College, he has encountered the powerful appeal of the Marine Corps ethic. "Semper Fidelis" comes...
| Author | Stanley Elkin |
| ISBN | 1564782921 |
An ambitious, digressive, and endlessly entertaining account of the thousand-year history of the George Millses, George Mills is the antithesis to the typical Horatio Alger story. Since the First Crusade, there has always been a George Mills, who despite his best efforts is unable to improve his...
| Author | Nicholson Baker |
| ISBN | 0399160965 |
cross-posted at: http://themocentricuniverse.blogspot....
i adore nicholson baker's writing voice and i really feel i can give no higher compliment than this: quite often it is how a writer's voice resonates with me that makes or breaks a novel for me; no matter what craft it might otherwise...
It's the rule-always watch your fives and twenty-fives. When a convoy halts to investigate a possible roadside bomb, stay in the vehicle and scan five meters in every direction. A bomb inside five meters cuts through the armor, killing everyone in the truck. Once clear, get out and sweep twenty-five...
In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter’s college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show...
| Author | Megan K. Stack |
| ISBN | 0385527160 |
A shattering account of war and disillusionment from a young woman reporter on the front lines of the war on terror.
A few weeks after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, journalist Megan K. Stack, a twenty-five-year-old national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times,...
