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...

"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" -- from publisher's web site. "[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...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize: "Uncannily perceptive stories written by an American from the viewpoint of Vietnamese citizens transplanted to Louisiana" (People). 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...

A US war correspondent is plunged into the Mexican civil war in "a whip-smart tale of intrigue and espionage" by the Pulitzer Prize winner (CNN.com). Undaunted by enemy territory and sweltering heat, American journalist Christopher "Kit" Marlowe Cobb has arrived in Mexico in the spring of 1914. The country is rocked by civil war, the American invasion of Vera Cruz, and the controversial presidency of Victoriano Huerta, El Chacal (The Jackal). Marlowe...

"Janet Burroway, author of Writing Fiction, the classic text on creative writing ... introduces her edited transcripts of Butler's thought-provoking lectures. From Where You Dream 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 fiction as the exploration of the human condition with yearning as its compass, Butler reinterprets...

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...

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...

"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...

In the first anthology of its kind, Robert Olen Butler and Phong Nguyen assemble an astounding collection of stories that cause listeners to contemplate war, peace, and social justice in a new light. The fourteen stories featured in this volume explore the varied and often unexpected outcomes of violence. The authors explore the tragedies that occur closer to home-not on military battlefields but rather in places that are never meant to be battlefields,...

A must-listen collection of four bibliomysteries by bestselling and award-winning authors Bibliomysteries Volume 3 includes: - "The Hemingway Valise" by Robert Olen Butler - "Dead Dames Don't Sing" by John Harvey - "The Dark Door" by Lisa Unger - "Bibliotheca Classica" by Simon Brett