Robert Olen Butler

Featured Works

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PUBLISHED: Aug.06.2011

A Small Hotel

Set in contemporary New Orleans but working its way back in time, A Small Hotel chronicles the relationship between Michael and Kelly Hays, who have decided to separate after twenty-four years of marriage. The book begins on the day that the Hays are to finalize their divorce. Kelly is due to be in court, but instead she drives from her home in Pensacola, Florida, across the...

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PUBLISHED: Oct.12.2010

Hell (Paperback)

Hatcher McCord is an evening news presenter who has found himself in Hell and is struggling to explain his bad fortune. He's not the only one to suffer this fate-in fact, he's surrounded by an outrageous cast of characters, including Humphrey Bogart, William Shakespeare, and almost all of the popes and most of the U.S. presidents. The question may be not who is in Hell but who isn'...

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PUBLISHED: Jul.01.2008

Intercourse

A provocative short-story collection from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler, Intercourse delightfully reveals what goes through a person's mind at a crucial moment - during sex. Smart, provocative, subtle, and erotic, each story is a many faceted gem. Butler dazzles and entertains as he channels the most intimate thoughts of 50 couples, including: Adam & Eve Bonnie...

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PUBLISHED: May.10.2001

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Robert Olen Butler's lyrical and poignant collection of stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Now Grove Press is proud to reissue this contemporary classic by one of America's most important living writers, in a new edition of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain...

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PUBLISHED:

From Where You Dream

Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, teaches graduate fiction at Florida State University - his version of literary boot camp. In From Where You Dream, Butler reimagines the process of writing as emotional rather than intellectual, and tells writers how to achieve the dreamspace necessary for composing honest, inspired fiction. Proposing that fiction is the...

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PUBLISHED: Sep.01.2009

Hell

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PUBLISHED: May.01.2006

Severance: Stories

The human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and one-half minutes after decapitation. In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. Inspired by the intersection of these two seemingly unrelated concepts, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler wrote sixty-two stories, each exactly 240 words in length,...

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PUBLISHED: Dec.01.2000

Mr. Spaceman

The night before the turn of the millennium, a tour bus bound for a Louisiana casino is suddenly beamed inside a spaceship hovering high above the Earth's surface. As its twelve passengers emerge nervously from the vehicle, they come face-to-face with the being who has brought them aboard, a sixteen-fingered zoot-suited alien named Desi. Over the course of the next twenty-four...

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PUBLISHED: Oct.15.1997

Tabloid Dreams

Amazon.com Review Robert Olen Butler's last short story collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, was a keen, piercing book told largely in the voice of Vietnamese immigrants to America. To say that his new collection is a departure is an understatement: Butler has taken actual headlines from the more outrageous of the supermarket tabloids and fashioned short fiction...

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Robert Olen's Latest Blogs

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Oct.05.2010 - 1:17 pm

A Book Recommendation

I first read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on a balcony of the Hotel Metropole in Saigon on three summer evenings in 1971. The tropical air was heavy and full of...

Apr.09.2010 - 11:24 am

Tweets from Hell : part 3

J. P. Sartre & J. Goebbels drink ape-piss tea in fetid bistro, wondering if they might’ve done differently without a walleye, a club foot Swore by Stalin, mollified Hitler,...

Feb.19.2010 - 2:34 pm

Tweets from Hell, part 2

There are no animals. Seeing balcony railings, park benches, window ledges in the Great Metropolis, everyone aches at the memory of birds Montezuma stuffs tacos for throngs at...

Feb.19.2010 - 2:25 pm

Tweets from Hell, part 1

When you ask a publisher what sells books, he or she will hem and haw and say that they do a lot of things to try to sell books, but honestly they don’t know if any of that works...

Writing

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Short Story: Moving Day

About Robert Olen

Robert Olen Butlerhas published eleven novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, and Hell—and five volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had...

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