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A Big Enough Lie

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A Big Enough Lie is a recent novel by Eric Bennett, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

A round-up of recent war fiction in the August Harper's focuses on Bennett's book, which takes as its protagonist a "student in a fictionalized version of the Iowa Writer's Workshop" named John Townley, who "pretends to be a disabled Iraq War veteran."

In the course of carrying out his fraud, Townley borrows and attributes to his own military experience particulars from "the life of an American soldier who is presumed dead after a nationally reported kidnapping in Babylon."

Townley's memoir comes to be "championed by an Oprah-like talk-show host, who transforms him into a celebrity and makes it all the more probable that he'll be exposed as a fraud."

Nice set up.
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