Robert Olen Butler

"A visionary and deeply moving novel centered around former newspaperman Sam Cunningham as he prepares to die, Late City covers much of the early twentieth century, unfurling as a conversation between the dying man and a surprising God. As the two review Sam's life, from his childhood in the American South and his time in the French trenches during World War I to a newspaper career in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties and the decades that follow, moments...

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...

Robert Quinlan is a seventy-year-old historian teaching at Florida State University, where his wife Darla is also tenured. Their marriage, forged in the fervor of anti-Vietnam War protests, now bears the fractures of time, both personal and historical, with the couple trapped in an existence of morning coffee and solitary jogging and separate offices. For Robert and Darla, the cracks remain under the surface, whereas the divisions in Robert's own...

"In the thrilling third installment of the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, Kit discovers a secret plan to transform Zeppelins into dangerous killing machines--and to turn the tide of war in Germany's favor" -- "[I]t is 1917, and the United States is wavering on the brink of war. Kit [Christopher Marlowe Cobb] is now a full-blown spy in England, working undercover in a castle on the Kentish coast owned by a suspected British government mole named...

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...

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...

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...

What happens to people's lives during times of battle and strife? From the American Revolution to the ongoing war in Iraq, the subject of this collection is how people cope with the dramatic shifts that come with war. Before Independence, a slave fights for freedom by taking up arms for the British, in WWI, a mother goes to the front lines to see her son, and in our time, a teenager in Oregon waits for e-mail from his father in the Middle East.