Robert Olen Butler
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"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...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The Vietnam War continues to play itself out in fiction, autobiography, and history books, but no American author has captured the experiences of the Vietnamese themselves--and caught their voices--more tellingly than Robert Olen Butler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain. The 15 stories collected here, all written in the first person, blend Vietnamese folklore, the terrible, lingering memories of war, American...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
[2013]
Language
English
Formats
Description
Christopher Marlowe ("Kit") Cobb, an American war correspondent reporting on World War I, has been tasked to follow a man named Brauer, a German intellectual and possible covert SS agent, into perilous waters aboard the ship Lusitania, as the man is believed to hold information vital to the war effort. Aboard the Lusitania on its fateful voyage, Cobb becomes smitten with famed actress Selene Bourgani, who for some reason appears to be working with...
Author
Series
Publisher
Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
"Autumn 1915. World War I is raging across Europe but Woodrow Wilson has kept Americans out of the trenches--though that hasn't stopped young men and women from crossing the Atlantic to volunteer at the front. Christopher "Kit" Cobb, a Chicago reporter with a second job as undercover agent for the U.S. government, is officially in Paris doing a story on American ambulance drivers, but his intelligence handler, James Polk Trask, soon broadens his mission....
Author
Publisher
Grove Press
Pub. Date
2011.
Language
English
Description
A tale set in reverse chronicles the failing marriage of New Orleans residents Michael and Kelly Hayes, who, on the day their divorce becomes final, revisit their shared history to evaluate the insecurities and inabilities that have driven them apart.
Author
Publisher
Grove Press
Pub. Date
[2005]
Language
English
Description
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 exploration of the human condition with yearning as its compass, Butler...
9) Hell
Author
Publisher
Grove Press
Pub. Date
[2009]
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Series
Publisher
Mysterious Press
Pub. Date
[2014]
Language
English
Description
"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...
Author
Publisher
Henry Holt
Pub. Date
1997.
Language
English
Description
"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...
Author
Publisher
Grove Press
Pub. Date
2004.
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Publisher
Atlantic Monthly Press
Pub. Date
2002.
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Publisher
Grove Press
Pub. Date
[2000]
Language
English
Description
"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,...
Author
Publisher
H. Holt & Co
Pub. Date
1996.
Language
English
Description
Twelve off-beat stories. In JFK Secretly Attends Jackie's Auction, President Kennedy, who survived the assassination and is a prisoner of the CIA, is allowed to attend an auction of his wife's property, while in Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot, a husband reincarnated as a parrot tries to make amends to his wife who now owns him.
Author
Publisher
Chronicle Books
Pub. Date
[2006]
Language
English
Description
Pulitzer-winning Butler presents 62 stories, each exactly 240 words long, capturing the flow of thoughts and feelings that go through a person's mind after their head has been severed. The characters are both real and imagined, including Medusa and Anne Boleyn.