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Houghton Mifflin
May 2008
On Sale: April 29, 2008
192 pages ISBN: 0547054017 EAN: 9780547054018 Hardcover
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Literature and Fiction Literary
Sometimes the planes don't fly on time.
Bennie Ford,
a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is
traveling to his estranged daughter's wedding when his
flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming
passengers in the purgatory of O'Hare airport, he watches
the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony.
Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing
he can: he starts to write a letter. But what begins as a
hilariously excoriating demand for a refund soon becomes a
lament for a life gone awry, for years misspent, talent
wasted, and happiness lost. A man both sinned against and
sinning, Bennie writes in a voice that is a marvel of
lacerating wit, heart-on-sleeve emotion, and wide-ranging
erudition, underlined by a consistent groundnote of regret
for the actions of a lifetime -- and made all the more
urgent by the fading hope that if he can just make it to the
wedding, he might have a chance to do something right.
A margarita blend of outrage, wicked humor,
vulnerability, intelligence, and regret, Dear American
Airlines gives new meaning to the term "airport novel" and
announces the emergence of major new talent in American fiction.
No awards found for this book.
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