<div>There are a dozen ways the American Dream can go awry in this &ldquo;unrepeatable . . . tour de force&rdquo; of short fiction from the Pulitzer Prize&ndash;winning author (The Washington Post Book World). &ldquo;[With] touches of Italo Calvino, Roald Dahl, and Gabriel Garc&iacute;a M&aacute;rquez&rdquo; the Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award&ndash;winning author dazzles with his mastery of the short story and his ability to find humor and humanity in the extremes of the American way (San Francisco Chronicle). Using tabloid headlines for inspiration&mdash;among them, &ldquo;Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis,&rdquo; &ldquo;Woman Struck by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed&rdquo;&mdash;Butler moves from the fantastic to the realistic, and from the lurid to the transcendent, as he explores 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 after losing a baking competition; a nine-year-old hit man; a woman who dates an extraterrestrial she met at Walmart; and a furtive and mournful JFK who survived the assassination. &ldquo;Butler peels back the sleazy veneer of the sensational to expose characters who long for love and the healing comfort of human compassion&rdquo; &mdash;USA Today &ldquo;Read all about it: if you&rsquo;re frustrated by the way nothing much seems to happen in modern short fiction, you&rsquo;ll find Tabloid Dreams a whole different story.&rdquo; &mdash;The New York Times Book Review &ldquo;These stories are masterpieces.&rdquo; &mdash;South Florida Sun-Sentinel &ldquo;Tabloid Dreams is full-blown American magical realism.&rdquo; &mdash;Boston Review</div>

Tabloid Dreams

<div>An intrepid reporter boards the Lusitania in a &ldquo;vivid . . . ripping good&rdquo; spy thriller from the Pulitzer Prize&ndash;winning author (The Wall Street Journal). It&rsquo;s 1915, World War I is in full swing, and foreign correspondent Christopher &ldquo;Kit&rdquo; Marlowe Cobb is tasked with following a German intellectual and possible secret service agent who&rsquo;s just boarded the British ocean liner Lusitania. But Cobb is soon distracted from his mission by the sultry Selene Bourgani, a world-renowned silent film star who also appears to be working with German Intelligence. The secrets Selene harbors have the potential to set the whole international conflict further aflame&mdash;and they&rsquo;re about to be ignited by a German U-boat attack off the Irish coast. From the perilous waters of the Atlantic, Cobb tails Selene into London&rsquo;s darkest alleyways, then on to the powder keg that is Istanbul. Across the war-torn stages of Europe and the Middle East, Cobb must venture deep behind enemy lines, knowing full well he may not return. The second book in the Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thrillers, The Star of Istanbul &ldquo;has it all: history galore, exotic foreign settings, a world-weary yet engaging protagonist, villains in abundance and a romance worthy of Bogart and Bergman&rdquo; (BookPage). &ldquo;[An] outstanding work of historical fiction.&rdquo; &mdash;The Huntington News &ldquo;Butler . . . holds the reader transfixed, like a kid at a Saturday matinee.&rdquo; &mdash;Booklist, starred review &ldquo;An exciting thriller with plenty of action, romance, and danger . . . [a] fast-paced journey through a world at war.&rdquo; &mdash;Library Journal</div>

The Star of Istanbul

<div>A US war correspondent is plunged into the Mexican civil war in &ldquo;a whip-smart tale of intrigue and espionage&rdquo; by the Pulitzer Prize winner (CNN.com). Undaunted by enemy territory and sweltering heat, American journalist Christopher &ldquo;Kit&rdquo; 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 thinks he&rsquo;s found his first big headline in the attempted assassination of a priest&mdash;the bullet miraculously rebounding off the holy man&rsquo;s cross. Employing a young pickpocket to help him identify the sniper, Cobb is soon led into a far more dangerous story: German officials, with ammunition ships docked in the port, are showing up in the city. When Cobb falls for a young Mexican laundress, he believes he&rsquo;s found a soft respite from hard news. If only she were as innocent as she seems. A sweeping saga of espionage, action, and romance set at the dawn of World War I, Robert Olen Butler kick-starts his rousing series with &ldquo;a thinking person&rsquo;s thriller, the kind of exotic adventure that, in better days, would have been filmed by Sam Peckinpah&rdquo; (TheWashington Post). &ldquo;Pancho Villa, fiery senoritas, and Germans up to no good&mdash;Robert Olen Butler is having fun . . . and readers will too.&rdquo; &mdash;Joseph Kanon, New York Times&ndash;bestselling author of The Good German &ldquo;[A] high-spirited adventure.&rdquo; &mdash;The New York Times Book Review &ldquo;Going off to war with Kit Cobb is as bracing and fun as it used to be in George MacDonald Fraser&rsquo;s Flashman books, or in Perez-Reverte&rsquo;s Captain Alatriste novels.&rdquo; &mdash;Dan Fesperman, Hammett Prize&ndash;winning author of The Double Game</div>

The Hot Country

<div>An American spy in Paris solves a legendary mystery as the Pulitzer Prize&ndash;winning author&rsquo;s &ldquo;thrilling historical series&rdquo; continues (The Wall Street Journal). Former Chicago journalist turned globe-trotting spy Christopher Marlowe Cobb has already lived many lives&mdash;from London to Mexico to Berlin&mdash;when he returns to France in 1922. Where better to work on his novel than among such literary expatriates as Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford, who convene at the Shakespeare &amp; Company bookstore in postwar Paris? Among them is Ernest Hemingway, fellow lone-wolf war correspondent, new friend, and confidante. Like Cobb, Hemingway is writing a novel. Unlike Cobb, however, Hemingway&rsquo;s manuscript has just been stolen off a train to Lausanne by what he&rsquo;s sure were foreign agents. To know what Hemingway knows is risky enough. But to write about it is positively dangerous. Never one to shy away from a challenge, Cobb volunteers to retrieve the manuscript&mdash;but he&rsquo;ll need all of his spycraft skills to infiltrate the compound where it&rsquo;s cached. </div>

The Hemingway Valise

<div>&ldquo;A cracking good spy thriller, with a cast of memorable characters and a terrifically suspenseful plot . . . Butler&rsquo;s elegant writing elevates the book.&rdquo; &mdash;Tampa Bay Times In the first two books of his acclaimed Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, The Hot Country and The Star of Istanbul, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler captured the hearts of historical crime fiction fans with the artfulness of his World War I settings and his charismatic leading man, a Chicago journalist recruited by American intelligence. In The Empire of Night, it is 1915, and President Woodrow Wilson is still assessing the war&rsquo;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&mdash;his own mother, the beautiful and mercurial Isabel Cobb, who also happens to be a world-famous stage actress. Starring in a touring production of Hamlet, Isabel&rsquo;s offstage role is to keep tabs on the supposed mole, an ardent fan of hers, while Kit tries to figure out Stockman&rsquo;s secret agenda. Following his mother and her escort from the relative safety of Britain into the lion&rsquo;s den of Berlin, Kit must remain in character, even under the very nose of the Kaiser. &ldquo;[A] thrilling historical series . . . There&rsquo;s something almost magical about the way the author re-creates this 1915 milieu.&rdquo; &mdash;The Wall Street Journal</div>

The Empire of Night

<div>The Pulitzer Prize&ndash;winning author &ldquo;shares his insights into&mdash;and passion for&mdash;the creation and experience of fiction with total openness&rdquo; (Publishers Weekly, starred review). 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&mdash;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 reinterprets the traditional tools of the craft using the dynamics of desire. Offering a direct view into the mind and craft of a literary master, From Where You Dream is an invaluable tool for the novice and experienced writer alike. &ldquo;Incisive and provocative, Butler&rsquo;s tutorials are a must for anyone even thinking about writing fiction, and readers, too, will benefit from his passionate exhortations.&rdquo; &mdash;Booklist</div>

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From Where You Dream

<div>From the Pulitzer Prize&ndash;winning author comes this &ldquo;fascinating . . . intense portrayal of the collapse of a marriage . . . [that] delivers a surprising charge&rdquo; (Jane Smiley, The Washington Post). An O, The Oprah Magazine &ldquo;Summer Reading List&rdquo; pick 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 panhandle to New Orleans. There she checks into Room 303 at the Olivier House in the city&rsquo;s French Quarter&mdash;the hotel where she and Michael fell in love some twenty-five years earlier. She now finds herself about to make a decision that will forever affect her, Michael, and their nineteen-year-old daughter, Samantha. &ldquo;From each spouse&rsquo;s point of view we witness the feelings that didn&rsquo;t break the surface at the time, but never went away.&rdquo; &mdash;The New York Times &ldquo;Intelligent, deeply moving . . . A Small Hotel is a masterful story that will remind readers once again why Robert Olen Butler has been called &lsquo;the best living American writer.&rsquo;&rdquo; &mdash;Fort Worth Star-Telegram</div>

A Small Hotel

<div>The Pulitzer Prize&ndash;winning author&rsquo;s &ldquo;strange and finally beautiful tale about obsession and modern love&rdquo; (Beth Kephart, The Baltimore Sun). Fair Warning is acclaimed novelist Robert Olen Butler&rsquo;s enthralling glimpse into a Manhattan auction house that caters to the shopping pheromones of the rich and powerful. At age forty, the company&rsquo;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 Amy as she closes an auction with &ldquo;fair warning,&rdquo; that object is Amy herself. Selected as a Book Sense 76 title and as a New York Times Summer Reading title, Fair Warning &ldquo;is as frank and sassy as its heroine&rdquo; (Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe). &ldquo;Fair Warning deserves our praise, but its author also deserves our gratitude, for his continued risk-taking and stubbornly singular sensibility.&rdquo; &mdash;Todd Kliman, The Washington Post</div>

Fair Warning

<div>&ldquo;A surprisingly sweet and droll first-person account of the vexed attempts of an alien to understand the bafflingly unpredictable human race.&rdquo; &mdash;Kirkus Reviews The Pulitzer Prize&ndash;winning author &ldquo;raises fin de si&egrave;cle literature to new heights and turns inevitability on its head&rdquo; in a novel of an alien named Desi (Publishers Weekly). For decades, Desi has kept a quiet vigil above the Earth while studying the confusing, fascinating, and frustrating primary species of our planet, occasionally venturing to the planet&rsquo;s surface to hear their thoughts and experience their memories using his empathic powers. Now, on December 31, 2000, he prepares for the final phase of his mysterious mission, which begins when he beams a tour bus bound for a Louisiana casino aboard his ship. The twelve passengers will be the last humans whose lives he will experience before he positions his spaceship in full and irrefutable view of the people of Earth and descends to the planet&rsquo;s surface to proclaim his presence to all of humanity at the turn of the millennium. Poignant, funny, and charming, Mr. Spaceman is filled with unexpected twists and turns, a tribute to the powers of love and understanding and the essence of what it means to be human. &ldquo;Funny and humane, entertaining and touching.&rdquo; &mdash;The New York Times</div>

Mr. Spaceman

<div>Winner of the Pulitzer Prize: &ldquo;Uncannily perceptive stories written by an American from the viewpoint of Vietnamese citizens transplanted to Louisiana&rdquo; (People). A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is Robert Olen Butler&rsquo;s Pulitzer Prize&ndash;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&rsquo;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&mdash;&ldquo;Missing&rdquo; and &ldquo;Salem&rdquo;&mdash;that brilliantly complete the collection&rsquo;s narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam to explore the experiences of a former Vietcong soldier and an American MIA. &ldquo;Deeply affecting . . . A brilliant collection of stories about storytellers whose recited folklore radiates as implicit prayer . . . One of the strongest collections I&rsquo;ve read in ages.&rdquo; &mdash;Ann Beattie</div>

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

<div>&ldquo;A novel that explores the darker side of human nature while making you laugh so hard iced tea almost comes out your nose.&rdquo; &mdash;The Tampa Tribune One of American literature&rsquo;s brightest stars and author of the Pulitzer Prize&ndash;winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain reimagines the underworld in an uproarious novel. 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&rsquo;s not the only one to suffer this fate&mdash;in fact, he&rsquo;s surrounded by an outrageous cast of characters, including Humphrey Bogart, William Shakespeare, and almost all of the popes and most of the US presidents. The question may be not who is in Hell, but who isn&rsquo;t. McCord is living with Anne Boleyn in the afterlife but their happiness is, of course, constantly derailed by her obsession with Henry VIII (and the removal of her head at rather inopportune moments). One day McCord meets Dante&rsquo;s Beatrice, who believes there is a way out of Hell, and the next morning, during an exclusive on-camera interview with Satan, McCord realizes that Satan&rsquo;s omniscience, which he has always credited for the perfection of Hell&rsquo;s torments, may be a mirage&mdash;and Butler is off on a madcap romp about good, evil, free will, and the possibility of escape. Butler&rsquo;s depiction of Hell is original, intelligent, and fiercely comic, a book Dante might have celebrated. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll never stop believing it: Robert Olen Butler is the best living American writer, period.&rdquo; &mdash;Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram</div>

Hell

<div>A powerful novel of a family haunted by the aftershocks of the Vietnam War&mdash;from the Pulitzer Prize&ndash;winning author of a A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. &ldquo;You share a war in one way. You pass it on in another.&rdquo; Passionate student activism brought Robert Quinlan together with his future wife during the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War. But since then, the long-married Florida university professors have grown apart. Their crumbling relationship is mirrored by Robert&rsquo;s estrangement from his brother . . . alienated by the same controversial war. Now, with their father&mdash;a World War II veteran&mdash;lying close to death, the rift in the family is sorely tested when Robert&rsquo;s brother refuses to put the past aside and return to say goodbye. And when Robert mistakes a homeless stranger for a fellow Vietnam veteran, his unstable presence in their lives will further stir the emotional scars that shattered the Quinlan men . . . and take its toll on those they love most. &ldquo;Butler&rsquo;s Faulknerian shuttling back and forth across the decades has less to do with literary pyrotechnics than with cutting to the chase. Perfume River hits its marks with a high-stakes intensity . . . Butler&rsquo;s prose is fluid, and his handling of his many time-shifts as lucid as it is urgent. His descriptive gifts don&rsquo;t extend just to his characters&rsquo; traits or their Florida and New Orleans settings, but to the history he&rsquo;s addressing.&rdquo; &mdash;Michael Upchurch, New York Times Book Review &ldquo;Butler moves easily among his characters to create a composite portrait of a family that has been wrecked by choices made during the Vietnam War.&rdquo; &mdash;Beth Nguyen, San Francisco Chronicle &ldquo;The story builds its force with great care . . . Its power is that we want to keep reading. The entire journey is masterfully rendered, Butler lighting a path back into the cave, completely unafraid.&rdquo; &mdash;Benjamin Busch, Washington Post &ldquo;Butler greatly enlarges our sense of what the Vietnam War cost to a generation . . . Perfume River tells a human story that sums up an entire era of American life.&rdquo; &mdash;Miami Herald &ldquo;Butler&rsquo;s assured, elegant novel . . . speaks eloquently of the way the past bleeds into the present, history reverberates through individual lives, and mortality challenges our perceptions of ourselves and others.&rdquo; &mdash;Publishers Weekly &ldquo;A heartbreaking story of fathers and sons and their expectations and disappointments . . . Perfume River is a powerful work that asks profound questions about betrayal and loyalty.&rdquo; &mdash;BookPage</div>

Perfume River

<div>“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 more they learn about each other, the more complex and dangerous their relationship becomes—and what follows conjures classical tragedy, infused with intense eroticism and with Butler’s reverence for Vietnamese mythology and history. The Deep Green Sea is a landmark work in the literature of love and war, from the acclaimed author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. “A slim, erotic and fable-like…book that picks up on many of Butler's abiding themes—the legacy of the Vietnam War, the clash of Vietnam’s folklore and mysticism with American manners…[Butler is] a writer working to cast a spell.” —TheNew York Times Book Review “In a deceptively understated manner, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Olen Butler introduces us to a pair of improbable modern lovers . . . [he] plants the seeds of a tragedy that will haunt his readers long after they finish this lyrical love story.” —People</div>

The Deep Green Sea

<div>”Gloriously imaginative and utterly hypnotizing short stories” inspired by vintage twentieth-century postcards, from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (Booklist, starred review). 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 upon to become a preacher, and then asked to complete an altogether more sinister task. In “The Ironworkers’ Hayride,” a young man named Milton embarks on a romantic adventure with a girl with a wooden leg. From the deeply moving “Carl and I,” in which a young wife writes a postcard in reply to a card from her husband who is dying of tuberculosis, to the eerily familiar “The One in White,” in which a newspaper reporter covers an incident of American military adventurism in a foreign land, these short stories are intimate and fascinating glimpses into the lives of ordinary people in an extraordinary age. “A wonderful collection.”—The Atlantic Monthly</div>

Had a Good Time

<div>A novel of murder and espionage during the First World War: &ldquo;Rich atmosphere and a propulsive plot...a satisfying, stylish thrill.&rdquo;&#8213;The Tampa Bay Times Autumn 1915. World War I is raging across Europe, but Woodrow Wilson has kept Americans out of the trenches&mdash;though that hasn&rsquo;t stopped young men and women from crossing the Atlantic to volunteer at the front. Christopher &ldquo;Kit&rdquo; 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. City-dwelling civilians are meeting death by dynamite in a new string of bombings, and the German-speaking Kit seems just the man to figure out who is behind them&mdash;possibly a German operative who has snuck in with the waves of refugees coming in from the provinces and across the border in Belgium. But there are elements in this pursuit that will test Kit Cobb, in all his roles, to the very limits of his principles, wits, and talents for survival. With Paris in the Dark, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler returns to his lauded Christopher Marlowe Cobb series and proves once again that he can craft &ldquo;a ripping good yarn&rdquo; (Wall Street Journal) with unmistakably literary underpinnings and a rich sense of the political and cultural atmosphere of the time. &ldquo;Best is Butler&#39;s feel for the black-and-white-movie atmospherics of a war zone after hours: It&#39;s a thrill to follow Kit to German hangouts like Le Rouge et le Noir, where a password will get you in, but there&rsquo;s no guarantee you&#39;ll get out.&rdquo;&#8213;Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review</div>

Paris in the Dark

<div>The Pulitzer Prize–winning author shares an “exceptionally nuanced, tender, funny, tragic, and utterly transfixing portrait” of one man’s troubled century (Booklist, starred review). At 115 years old, former newspaperman Sam Cunningham is also the last surviving veteran of World War I. As he prepares to die in a Chicago nursing home, the results of the 2016 presidential election come in—and he finds himself in a wide-ranging conversation with a surprising God. As the two review Sam’s life, the grand epic of the twentieth century comes sharply into focus. Sam grows up in Louisiana under the flawed morality of an abusive father. Eager to escape, Sam enlists in the army while still underage. Though the hardness his father instilled in him helps him make it out of World War I alive, it also prevents him from contending with the emotional wounds of war. Back in the United States, Sam moves to Chicago to begin a career as a newspaperman that will bring him close to the major historical turns of the twentieth century. There he meets his wife and has a son, whose fate counters Sam’s at almost every turn. As he contemplates his relationships—with his parents, his brothers in arms, his wife, his editor, and most importantly, his son—Sam is amazed at what he still has left to learn about himself after all these years.</div>

Robert Olen Butler
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Books By Robert Olen Butler (16 Books)