Ben Fountain is the author of a novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and a short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. His work has received the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and a Whiting Writer’s Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award in both the U.S. and the U.K. (international authors division). His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, The Guardian, IntranQu’îllités (Haiti), Esquire, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. His series on the 2016 U.S. presidential election for The Guardian was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and will be published in 2018 in book form under the title Beautiful Country Burn Again. The film adaptation of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, directed by three-time Oscar winner Ang Lee, was released worldwide in 2016.