First off, thanks to the good people at ARCycling and to Mariela O. for getting me this book. Free books are always a cause for thanks, regardless of what I end up thinking of the book itself. In this case....well, my reaction was just incredibly ambivalent. Robert Olen Butler is apparently a Pul...
Butler is funny as Hell while asking the Big Serious Questions. The more familiar you are with Dante, the better this novel. I knew right away, on page 2, I was going to like the book when one of the first denizens introduced was "George Clemens, inventor of the electric hand dryer for public res...
A while back, I decided (again) that life is just too damn short to read easy, pop books, and that I would dedicate my reading and living only to challenge. Then, after reading Pynchon's Bleeding Edge (Challenging and I loved it), I gave my brain a rest and read Olen's The Star of Istanbul. One o...
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. Now Grove Press is proud to reissue this contemporary classic by one of America's ...
WARNING, SPOILERS:Though the racial and historical dynamics could've been dealt with better--though Butler certainly gives it a good try--what I found most interesting about the book is the revelation of incest at the end of it. The two have fallen in love only to discover they are father and dau...
I am a huge fan of the short story - a literary form which seems to have been largely demoted to appearing in magazines and journals (of various reputations), from which the crème de la crème is then selected and anthologized in volumes hardly anyone reads. An author who wants to publish a collec...
3 and 1/2 starsI don't generally get along with fables, so when I saw this work described as such on the inner flap that didn't bode well for me, though I also know inner flaps lie, so I hoped that would be true here. At first, it didn't seem like a fable at all (good) and then when it did, it wa...
Wilson 207 12 "My Summer in Vulcan" by Rita Mae Reese 229 Appendix: "Open Arms" by Robert Olen Butler 253 INTRODUCTION Sometime in the early 1980s, the playwright Maria Irene Fornes came to Florida State University to conduct a series of workshops. I had already been teaching writing for a decade...
When I was at last released from the tuxedo and ready to have a final night’s sleep in a good bed before heading off to an unknown number of nights’ sleep in unknown circumstances, I lay down in my bed at the Arundel and almost at once a knock came at my door. Three quick, firm raps. ...
I also asked him to get someone to translate a few German words for me, putting only what I didn’t know in the telegram, not the whole of Mensinger’s personal notes. At the portales Bunky was nowhere to be seen. I should have gone immediately to find him. But no. He was almost certainly sleeping ...
The House of Krupp was what Lord Kitchener and the Brits desperately needed, a homegrown industrialist producing more artillery shells than the rest of the world combined.Jeremy squared himself to the box, crouched, put his arms around it, and lifted.Only six or eight inches.He put the box down a...
I carry him on my chest and it’s a real tattoo and he was there like that when I come out of Mama. That was the week after he died, Elvis, and Mama made the mistake of letting folks know about it and there was that one big newspaper story, but she regretted it right away and she was happy that th...
Linda has not yet checked in with him. It must be going badly at their friends’ house. He has taken up his deer tine and his softest square of camel hide and has hunched into the furious burnishing of the edges of half a dozen messenger bags, filling himself with the smell of warming beeswax and ...