The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch

In this daring novel, Yuknavitch takes a provocative look at the intimate relationship among love, art, and sex in a group of emotionally scarred artists who want to save one of their own. The Small Backs of Children is written in the voices of characters without first names—photographer, writer, poet, performance artist, playwright, filmmaker, and painter—the novel begins in modern Eastern Europe (likely Lithuania), occupied by an unseen force, where a photojournalist captures an award-winning shot: a young girl running from her exploding home, in which the rest of her family dies. The girl escapes into the woods, making her way to a widow's home; the widow teaches her about art, and the girl begins to paint. Meanwhile, an American writer who is friends with the photographer, is hospitalized with severe depression. The writer's best friend, a poet, believes she can help the writer; she enters the war zone to bring the orphaned girl to the United States. Yuknavitch's novel is disturbing and challenging, but undoubtedly leaves its mark. (Publisher Weekly Reviews)

Book to Movie Alert: Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk

Ang Lee will direct Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, based on the novel by Ben Fountain, a satire set in Texas during America's war in Iraq that explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad. 

Noting that it is Lee's first project since the Oscar-winning Life of Pi, Deadline.com reported that the director is reuniting with Tom Rothman at TriStar for the movie. Simon Beaufoy wrote the script. (Read the full story here) No word yet on when this book is set to hit the screen.

Summary: A ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents at "the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal"—three minutes and forty-three seconds of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew—has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America's most sought-after heroes. For the past two weeks, the Bush administration has sent them on a media-intensive nationwide Victory Tour to reinvigorate public support for the war. Now, on this chilly and rainy Thanksgiving, the Bravos are guests of America's Team, the Dallas Cowboys, slated to be part of the halftime show alongside the superstar pop group Destiny's Child.

Over the course of the day, Specialist Billy Lynn will begin to understand difficult truths about himself, his country, his struggling family, and his brothers-in-arms—soldiers both dead and alive. In the final few hours before returning to Iraq, Billy will drink and brawl, yearn for home and mourn those missing, face a heart-wrenching decision, and discover pure love and a bitter wisdom far beyond his years.