Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I’d known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we’re always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we’re doing things we technically don’t know how to do.

Henry Award[citation needed]
2007 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara[citation needed]
2007 Whiting Writers Award
2012 National Book Award (fiction) finalist Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
2012 Specsavers National Book Awards International Author of the Year shortlist for Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
2012 Good Reads Choice Awards 2012 Best Fiction finalist for Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
2012 Flaherty-Dunnan Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (fiction) Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize 2012 (fiction) finalist Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk


Bibliography
Brief Encounters With Che Guevara
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1980 and a law degree from the Duke University School of Law in 1983. S.

Ben Fountain (b. He was won many awards including a PEN/Hemingway award for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for his debut novel Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk.