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Ben Fountain

Ben Fountain Biography

Fiction writer

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“The freaking randomness is what wears on you, the difference between life, death, and horrible injury sometimes as slight as stooping to tie your bootlace on the way to chow, choosing the third shitter in line instead of the fourth, turning your head to the left instead of the right. Random. How that shit does twist your mind. Billy sense the true mindfucking potential of it on their first trip outside the wire, when Shroom advised him to place his feet one in front of the other instead of side by side, that way if an IED blew low through the Humvee Billy might lose only one foot instead of two. After a couple of weeks of aligning his feet just so, tucking his hands inside his body armor, always wearing eye pro and all the rest, he went to Shroom and asked how do you keep from going crazy! Shroom nodded like this was an eminently reasonable question to ask, then told him of an Inuit shaman he’d read about somewhere, how this man could supposedly look at you and know to the day when you were going to die. He wouldn’t tell you, though; he considered that impolite, an intrusion into matters that were none of his business.”

WarDeathFateRandomness
Book:Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
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“No it was my choice. It's what I wanted to do. And I knew they'd probably send me to Iraq. It's not like anybody lied to me." She groans. "Billy, all these mofos ever do is lie. You think if they halfway told the truth we'd even be in a fucking war? You know what I think, I think we don't deserve to have you guys die for us. No country that lets It's leaders lie like that deserves a single soldier to die for it.”

Sacrifice
Book:Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
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“You can deny him, he thought, watching his father across the table. You can hate him, love him, pity him, never speak to or look at him in the eye again, never deign even to be in his crabbed and bitter presence, but you're still stuck with the son of a bitch. One way or another he'll always be your daddy, not even all-powerful death was going to change that.”

FamilyFathersInevitabilitySonsDysfunctional FamiliesAbusive Parents
Book:Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
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“What to call it - the spark of God? Survival instinct? The souped-up computer of an apex brain evolved from eons in the R&D of natural selection? You could practically see the neurons firing in the kid’s skull. His body was all spring and torque, a bundle of fast-twitch muscles that exuded faint floral whiffs of ripe pear. So much perfection in such a compact little person - Billy had to tackle him from time to time, wrestle him squealing to the ground just to get that little rascal in his hands, just your basic adorable thirty-month-old with big blue eyes clear as chlorine pools and Huggies poking out of his stretchy-waist jeans. So is this what they mean by the sanctity of life? A soft groan escaped Billy when he thought about that, the war revealed in this fresh and gruesome light. Oh. Ugh. Divine spark, image of God, suffer the little children and all that - there’s real power when words attach to actual things. Made him want to sit right down and weep, as powerful as that. He got it, yes he did, and when he came home for good he’d have to meditate on this, but for now it was best to compartmentalize, as they said, or even better not to mentalize at all.”

ChildrenSanctity Of Life
Book:Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
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“You have the mainstream bourgeois life of the U.S., Europe, the "developed" world - the life of technology, education, mortgages, careers, a certain level of physical comfort - while on the other hand, several billion people on the planet exist on less than a dollar a day. That's a huge and terrible reality to get your head around.”

PeopleWorldHandsRealityCertainLevelsCareersTechnologyPlanetsHugeTerribleComfortEuropeDollarsBillionsMainstreamMortgageBourgeoisTechnology In Education
Author:Ben Fountain
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“You'd think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing.”

PeopleThinkingShouldFactsBigsWould BeCausesStuffBornCommonStruggleProtectAnd LoveStriveBoundsHardestThickThings In LifeHardest ThingGeneticsLove One AnotherSpiralsSure ThingNo Brainer
Book:Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
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“I have a horror of being self-indulgent and wasting time, and there is that risk in doing this kind of work. Are you totally deluded in sitting down at a desk every day and trying to write something? Is it self-indulgent, or might it possibly lead to something worthwhile? At a certain point I decided to keep on because I felt like the work was getting better, and I was taking great pleasure in that.”

WritingTryingKindSelfMightCertainFeltPleasureRiskHorrorSittingDecidedGet BetterWasting TimeWorthwhileDesksSitting DownDeludedSelf Indulgent
Author:Ben Fountain
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“The strange, wonderful stories of Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain introduce us to the tremendously gifted Kirsten Menger-Anderson, a writer whose subject is nothing less than the diagnosis and cure of the human malady. We follow twelve generations of New York City's Steenwycks family through their forays into phrenology, mesmerism, radium therapy and similar misadventures, a historically rich narrative that Menger-Anderson delivers in striking, elegant prose and with a sure eye for detail. This is a remarkable debut by a writer to watch.”

HumansStoriesEyeCitiesBrainWatchesRichWonderfulGenerationsSubjectsNew YorkStrangeDoctorsDetailsCuresNarrativeTherapyProseRemarkableNew York CityTwelveIntroducingGiftedElegantVansDiagnosisDebutMaladyOlafMisadventurePhrenologyEye For Detail
Author:Ben Fountain
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