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

A visionary and poignant novel centered around former newspaperman Sam Cunningham as he prepares to die, Late City covers much of the early 20th 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 to his fledgling newspaper career in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties and the decades that follow, snippets of history are brought sharply into focus.

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.

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 to volunteer at the front. Christopher "Kit" Cobb, a Chicago reporter with a second job as undercover agent for the US 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.

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.

Robert Quinlan is a 70-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 family are more apparent: he has almost no relationship with his brother Jimmy.

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.

This is the ideal collection for all lovers of first-rate erotic literature. Edited by Susie Bright, whom the Utne Reader calls "one of the leading thinkers and visionaries of our time", this fourth annual edition of a best-selling series brings together the most outstanding erotic writing of the year, including peculiarly dark and dangerous takes, as well as cutting-edge forays into the world of cybersex.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.