Showing results by author "Robert Olen Butler" in All Categories

Robert Olen Butler, author of Perfume River, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and A Small Hotel, 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 dream space necessary for composing honest, inspired fiction.

A must-listen collection of four bibliomysteries by bestselling and award-winning authors

Fiction, poetry, and music come together to create something new: Verb. Original stories and poems you won't find anywhere else, by the best writers in the country, brought to you in an innovative format. Verb is the ancient oral tradition and the venerable literary magazine combined into a fresh new package: the audioquarterly.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler tells a magical and humorous contemporary fable that captures the state of humanity at the cusp of a new millennium - as seen through the uniquely sensitive perspective of an empathetic extraterrestrial. An audible.com audio exclusive!

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, hes 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't.

The first World War is underway; Germany has allied with the Ottoman Empire, and the Turkish caliphs have declared jihad on the British Empire. Meanwhile, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson hesitates to enter the fray. Aboard the passenger liner Lusitania, war correspondent and American spy Kit Cobb has been assigned to shadow a German intellectual and possible covert agent who is believed to have information vital to the war effort. During the voyage Cobb is smitten with famed actress Selene Bourgani, who inexplicably seems to be working for the Germans.

Set in contemporary New Orleans but working its way back in time, A Small Hotel chronicles the relationship between Michael and Kelly Hayes, who have decided to separate after 20 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 to New Orleans and checks into the hotel where she and Michael fell in love some 20 years earlier.

Christopher Marlowe Cobb ("Kit"), the swashbuckling early 20th-century American newspaper war correspondent, travels to Mexico in April and May of 1914, during that country’s civil war and the American invasion of Vera Cruz. But covering the war in enemy territory and in sweltering heat isn't enough of a challenge for Cobb. Soon, he's falling in love with a young Mexican laundress, Luisa, who may not be as innocent as she seems, and he's witnessing the inexplicable attempted sniper assassination of a priest (miraculously, the bullet rebounds off the cross around his neck, leaving him unharmed).

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 World War I, 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.

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. This edition includes two subsequently published stories - "Salem" and "Missing" - that brilliantly complete the collection's narrative journey with a return to the jungles of Vietnam.

Winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, O. Henry Award and Edgar Awards, the 19 writers in this 2005 edition are not just considered some of the best Southern writers, but among the best American writers period. With works by such writers as Dennis Lehane, Moira Crone, Robert Olen Butler, Cary Holladay, Tom Franklin, and Rebecca Soppe, this collection provides an electrifying current of deep, dark subjects set in the brutal, but charming south.

In The Empire of Night, it is 1915, and President Woodrow Wilson is still assessing the war's threat to the United States. After proving himself during the Lusitania mission, Kit is now a full-blown spy, working undercover in a castle on the Kentish coast owned by a suspected British government mole named Sir Albert Stockman. And Kit is again thrown together with a female spy - his own mother, the beautiful and mercurial Isabel Cobb, who also happens to be a world-famous stage actress.

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, like schools and churches. The fiction reveals the violence that renders our most sacred and seemingly safest of places vulnerable.