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“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

”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

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.

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 thinks he’s found his first big headline in the attempted assassination of a priest—the bullet miraculously rebounding off the holy man’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’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 “a thinking person’s thriller, the kind of exotic adventure that, in better days, would have been filmed by Sam Peckinpah” (TheWashington Post). “Pancho Villa, fiery senoritas, and Germans up to no good—Robert Olen Butler is having fun . . . and readers will too.” —Joseph Kanon, New York Times–bestselling author of The Good German “[A] high-spirited adventure.” —The New York Times Book Review “Going off to war with Kit Cobb is as bracing and fun as it used to be in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books, or in Perez-Reverte’s Captain Alatriste novels.” —Dan Fesperman, Hammett Prize–winning author of The Double Game

There are a dozen ways the American Dream can go awry in this “unrepeatable . . . tour de force” of short fiction from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author (The Washington Post Book World). “[With] touches of Italo Calvino, Roald Dahl, and Gabriel García Márquez” the Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award–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—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, 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. “Butler peels back the sleazy veneer of the sensational to expose characters who long for love and the healing comfort of human compassion” —USA Today “Read all about it: if you’re frustrated by the way nothing much seems to happen in modern short fiction, you’ll find Tabloid Dreams a whole different story.” —The New York Times Book Review “These stories are masterpieces.” —South Florida Sun-Sentinel “Tabloid Dreams is full-blown American magical realism.” —Boston Review

In The Deuce, Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler's searing sixth novel, the intertwined legacies of Vietnam and America are explored in the startlingly fresh voice of a young Amerasian boy, Tony Hatcher. At age six, Tony is snatched away from Saigon and his bar-girl mother and brought to the United States by his American father, a former Army officer, not a district attorney. For ten years, Tony grows up as ill at ease amid the affluence of the new jersey shore as he had been as one of the despised mixed-blood 'children of dust' in Saigon. And in America he has not escaped the stress and the stigma of embodying two seemingly irreconcilable cultures; that conflict rages within him, particularly as he becomes a teenager.

Pulitzer-winning Butler presents 62 stories, each exactly 240 words long, capturing the flow of thoughts and feelings that go through a person's mind after their head has been severed. The characters are both real and imagined, including Medusa and Anne Boleyn.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s “strange and finally beautiful tale about obsession and modern love” (Beth Kephart, The Baltimore Sun). 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 Amy as she closes an auction with “fair warning,” that object is Amy herself. Selected as a Book Sense 76 title and as a New York Times Summer Reading title, Fair Warning “is as frank and sassy as its heroine” (Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe). “Fair Warning deserves our praise, but its author also deserves our gratitude, for his continued risk-taking and stubbornly singular sensibility.” —Todd Kliman, The Washington Post

Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, has been praised as "the best living American writer, period" (Fort Worth Star-Telegram). During his prestigious career, he has been guiding, inspiring, and awakening graduate fiction students at Florida State University-his version of literary boot camp. Now Janet Burroway, author of the classic text Writing Fiction, introduces her edited transcripts of his thought-provoking lectures.