Search results for ""author frank bill""

Miles is a Vietnam vet who’s worried he’s going to lose his job and his tenuous grasp on a stable life because of a fight he had with a co-worker over some steroids. His PTSD and struggles to control his steroid-fuelled violent tendencies complicate life with his girlfriend, Shelby, a stripper who only occasionally seems to have the proverbial heart of gold. She certainly seems to possess more kindness and generosity than her brother, Wylie, who’s currently on the run after being implicated in the deaths of two local oxycodone dealers and has their relatives on his tail. When Wylie kidnaps his sister and holes up in Miles's country lair, it is, frankly, threatening to become a bit too much for steroid-addled Miles to handle. Frank Bill’s world is as wild and rollicking as ever, punctuated with uproarious event after uproarious event. But in Back to the Dirt, he goes deeper than wall-to-wall brawl—with Miles, he takes us back to the experiences overseas that stripped the innocence and optimism from the heartland dream; with Shelby, he shows us that you didn’t have to travel to Vietnam to see real darkness. But still, even in this benighted state, there’s the dirt to come back to. And maybe, just maybe, Bill shows, that can be enough.

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In the highly personal tradition of Jenny Offill and Elena Ferrante, Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride is loosely based on Sweany's tragicomic teenage life growing up in Indiana and his later years working in the New York publishing industry. Hunter S. Thompson biographer William McKeen called it, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Leave It to Beaver." And bestselling author Frank Bill adds, "In the vein of David Sedaris or Chuck Palahniuk, Brian Sweany has written a tight satirical story that has you bent over with laughter one moment, then wiping away the tears the next minute."

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