Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, 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 dreamspace necessary for composing honest, inspired fiction. Proposing that fiction is the exploration of the human condition with yearning as its compass, Butler...

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 from crossing the Atlantic to volunteer at the front. Christopher "Kit" 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....

It's 1915, World War I is in full swing, and foreign correspondent Christopher "Kit" Marlowe Cobb is tasked with following a German intellectual and possible secret service agent traveling on 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 more Cobb thinks he knows her, the less he really does....

"There are three things about this planet which are too wonderful for me. Make that four things. The way of dreams in the mind; the way of tears in the eye; the way of words in the mouth; and the way of my wife Edna Bradshaw when she acts like a cat and love-nibbles me into her arms." This is the voice of Desi, the hero of Robert Olen Butler's novel Mr. Spaceman, who has kept a quiet vigil above the Earth for decades while studying the confusing,...

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 WWI, 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.

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...