Robert Olen Butler
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A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is Robert Olen Butler's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of lyrical and poignant stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its enduring impact on the Vietnamese. Written in a soaring prose, Butler's haunting and powerful stories blend Vietnamese folklore and contemporary American realities, creating a vibrant panorama that is epic in its scope. This new edition includes two previously uncollected stories...
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Former Chicago journalist turned globe-trotting spy Christopher Marlowe Cobb has already lived many lives-from London to Mexico to Berlin-when he returns to France in 1922. Where better to work on his novel than among such literary expatriates as Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford, who convene at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in postwar Paris? Among them is Ernest Hemingway, fellow lone-wolf war correspondent, new friend, and confidante. Like Cobb,...
3) Mr. Spaceman
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"There are three things about this planet which are too wonderful for me. Make that four things. The way of dreams in the mind; the way of tears in the eye; the way of words in the mouth; and the way of my wife Edna Bradshaw when she acts like a cat and love-nibbles me into her arms." This is the voice of Desi, the hero of Robert Olen Butler's novel Mr. Spaceman, who has kept a quiet vigil above the Earth for decades while studying the confusing,...
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The new novel from one of American literature's brightest stars, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler's uproarious new book is a novel set in the underworld. Its main character, Hatcher McCord, is an evening news presenter who has found himself in Hell and is struggling to explain his bad fortune. He's far from the only one to suffer this fate-in fact, he's surrounded by an outrageous cast of...
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For many years, author Robert Olen Butler has collected picture postcards from the early twentieth century-not so much for the pictures on the fronts but for the messages written on the backs, little bits of the captured souls of people long since passed away. Using these brief messages of real people from another age, Butler here creates fully imagined stories that speak to the universal human condition.
In "Up by Heart," a Tennessee miner is called...
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Using bottom-rack tabloid headlines as inspiration-among them, "Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis," "Woman Struck by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac," and "Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed"-Butler moves from the fantastic to the realistic, from the lurid to the transcendent in exploring exile, loss, aspiration, and the search for self. Along the way, we meet a wife who uses her glass eye to spy on her cheating husband, a widow who sets herself on fire...
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"A wrenching love story" about the relationship between a Vietnam veteran and a woman who was orphaned when Saigon fell, by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (Chicago Tribune).
This is an incandescent tale of modern love between a Vietnamese woman, orphaned in 1975 when Saigon fell to the Communists, and a Vietnam War veteran, returning from America to seek closure for decades-old emotional wounds. The more they nurture the love between them, the...
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Fair Warning is acclaimed novelist Robert Olen Butler's enthralling glimpse into a Manhattan auction house that caters to the shopping pheromones of the rich and powerful. At age forty, the company's charismatic star employee, Amy Dickerson, is capable of selling a Renoir painting of a pudgy nude for twice its value. Her customers are intoxicated by the objects they covet. And sometimes, such as when the dark and mysterious Trevor locks eyes with...