Ben fountain author biography graphic organizers
•
Dallas Museum of Art
Devil Makes Three, the brilliant and propulsive new novel by Ben Fountain, addresses blood politics, the machinations of power, and a country in the midst of upheaval. When a violent coup d’état in Haiti leads to the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an American expat desperate for money teams up with his best friend, the only son of a socially prominent Haitian family, to explore the legendary shipwrecks off the coast of Haiti rumored to contain priceless treasures. This mission kicks off a cascade of ill-fated incidents, including the discovery of an arms-trafficking ring masquerading as a U.S. government humanitarian aid office.
Ben Fountain’s novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk received the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He received the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Whiting Writers Award for his short story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara.
Rosalyn Story is a musician, a freelance
•
Subverting the rules
1Ben Fountain has a way with games. In his fiction, games of all sorts allow access to a vision of truth that could not be reached through other means. In that sense, his games are serious ones, of epistemological importance. They vary greatly in kind, but converge to expose dissimulations and lies, to shed light on the unsaid processes at work in human transactions, and to reveal what is at stake: a serious matter of solidarity against corruption, of charity against greed.
2In the collection of stories Brief Encounters With Che Guevara and the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ben Fountain’s characters play many games: baseball, football, golf or chess; they play war, they play a part, they act out, or they play the players to subvert the rules of the game, while Ben Fountain’s narrative voices play with one another, trying to find a collective voice, or to emphasize the lack of one. Dissembling allows characters and narrators to look for a positio
•
Kaveh Akbar and Ben Fountain will read from their new novels Martyr! and Devil Makes Three, followed by an on-stage conversation with writer and professor at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, Brenda Peynado. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the / Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
KAVEH AKBAR – whom Tommy Orange calls “one of my favorite writers, ever” – is a noted Iranian-American author and scholar. His first poetry collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf – “one of the best debuts in recent memory” (Eduardo C. Corral) – was described by Roxanne Gay as “an outstanding book of poetry&#; unknowable and always beautiful.” His second collection, Pilgrim Bell – which Time called “bracing in its honesty and noteworthy in its steadfast adherence to finding the spiritual in even the most mundane settings” – is, according to Mary Karr, “destined to become a classic, another blazing torch added