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 most important living writers, in a new edition of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain that includes two subsequently published stories -- Salem and Missing -- that brilliantly complete the collection's narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam.

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 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.

In the third installment of his critically acclaimed Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler continues to win over readers with the artfulness of his World War I settings and his charismatic leading man, a Chicago war correspondent turned spy.

It is 1915, and President Woodrow Wilson is still assessing the war's threat to the United States. There is a mole in the British government, and Cobb's intelligence handlers send him to a castle on the Kentish coast to investigate a key suspect, Sir Albert Stockman. Working deep undercover, Cobb must also contend with an unusual sidekick--his own mother, the beautiful and mercurial Isabel Cobb. A famous stage actress, she is starring in a touring production of Hamlet and has been recruited to simultaneously keep tabs on Stockman, who happens to be an ardent fan. As the trio leaves the relative safety of Britain and heads into the lion's den of Berlin, Kit must unravel Stockman's secret agenda, and remain in character even under the very nose of the Kaiser.

The Hot Country is an epic tale of war, love, and espionage. Christopher Marlowe Cobb is an American newspaper war correspondent who travels to Mexico in 1914 to report on the country's civil war, the invasion of Vera Cruz, and the controversial presidency of Victoriano Huerta, El Chacal (The Jackal). Covering the war in enemy territory and sweltering heat, Cobb falls in love with Luisa, a beautiful Mexican laundress, who is not as innocent as she seems.

Upon investigating a German ammunition ship docked in the marina, Cobb finds himself fired upon by unknown assailants, then witnesses a priest being shot with marksman-like precision. Cobb employs a young pickpocket to help him find out the identity of the sniper and, more importantly, why important German officials are coming into the city in the middle of the night from that very ship docked in the port. Soon Cobb finds himself wrapped up in a web of secrets that could change the the fate of the fate of myriad world leaders, redefine the destiny of two continents, and end his life at any moment. An action-packed chronicle of passion and war, Butler's powerful crime-fiction debut is a thriller not to be missed.

A 115-year-old man lies on his deathbed as the 2016 election results arrive, and revisits his life in this moving story of love, fatherhood, and the American century from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler.

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

Sam grows up in Louisiana, with a harsh father, who he comes to resent both for his physical abuse and for what Sam eventually perceives as his flawed morality. Eager to escape and prove himself, Sam enlists in the army as a sniper while still underage. The hardness his father instilled in him helps him make it out of World War I alive, but, as he recounts these tales on his deathbed, we come to realize that it also prevents him from contending with the emotional wounds of war. Back in the U.S., Sam moves to Chicago to begin a career as a newspaperman that will bring him close to all 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 in this heart-rending novel from the Pulitzer Prize winner.

The new novel from one of American literature's brightest stars, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler's uproarious new novel is set in the underworld. 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's not the only one to suffer this fate--in fact, he's 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. 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). Butler's Hell isn't as much a boiling lake of fire--although there is that--as it is a Sisyphean trial tailored to each inhabitant, whether it's the average Joes who die and are reconstituted many times a day to do it all again, or the legendary newspaperman William Randolph Hearst, doomed to obscurity as a blogger mocked by his fellows because he can't figure out Caps Lock. One day McCord meets Dante'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's omniscience, which he has always credited for the perfection of Hell's torments, may be a mirage--and Butler is off on a madcap romp about good, evil, free will, and the possibility of escape. Butler's depiction of Hell is original, intelligent, and fiercely comic, a book Dante might have celebrated.

An unrepeatable feat, a tour de force. --The Washington Post Book World

In Tabloid Dreams, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler dazzles with his mastery of the short story and his empathy for eccentric and ostracized characters. Using tabloid headlines as inspiration--Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis, Woman Struck by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac, and JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction--Butler moves from the fantastic to the realistic, exploring enduring concepts of exile, loss, aspiration, and the search for self. Along the way, the cast includes a woman who can see through her glass eye when it's removed from the socket, a widow who sets herself on fire after losing a baking competition, a nine-year-old hit man, and a woman who dates an extraterrestrial she met in a Walmart parking lot. Tabloid Dreams weaves a seamless tapestry of high and low culture, of the surreal, sordid, and humorously sad.

A humorous and touching novel about an alien being's arrival at the turn of the millennium is presented by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

From one of America's most important writers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, comes Perfume River, an exquisite novel that examines family ties and the legacy of the Vietnam war through the portrait of a single North Florida family.

Robert Quinlan is a seventy-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, with the couple trapped in an existence of morning coffee, solitary jogging, and separate offices. The cracks in Robert and Darla's relationship remain under the surface, whereas the divisions in Robert's family are more apparent: he has almost no relationship with his brother Jimmy, who became estranged from the family as the Vietnam War intensified. As Robert and Jimmy's father, who is a veteran of World War II, draws near to the end of his life, aftershocks of war ripple across the family once again, with Jimmy refusing to appear at his father's bedside. And an unstable homeless man, whom Robert meets at a restaurant and at first takes to be a fellow Vietnam veteran, turns out to have a deep impact not just on Robert, but on all of the people closest to him.

A profound and poignant novel that continues Butler's exploration of America, war, and the family, as begun in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and A Small Hotel, Perfume River is a powerful and moving portrait of the challenges of close relationships, the resonance of personal choice, and the American experience.

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 a ripping good yarn (Wall Street Journal) with unmistakably literary underpinnings.

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. 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--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.

Fleetly plotted but engaging with political and cultural issues that deeply resonate today, Paris in the Dark is this series' best novel yet.

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 a ripping good yarn (Wall Street Journal) with unmistakably literary underpinnings.

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. 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--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.

Fleetly plotted but engaging with political and cultural issues that deeply resonate today, Paris in the Dark is this series' best novel yet.

A 115-year-old man lies on his deathbed as the 2016 election results arrive, and revisits his life in this moving story of love, fatherhood, and the American century from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler.

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

Sam grows up in Louisiana, with a harsh father, who he comes to resent both for his physical abuse and for what Sam eventually perceives as his flawed morality. Eager to escape and prove himself, Sam enlists in the army as a sniper while still underage. The hardness his father instilled in him helps him make it out of World War I alive, but, as he recounts these tales on his deathbed, we come to realize that it also prevents him from contending with the emotional wounds of war. Back in the U.S., Sam moves to Chicago to begin a career as a newspaperman that will bring him close to all 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 in this heart-rending novel from the Pulitzer Prize winner.

Named Peacemaker of the Year in the 2022 Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Awards

In the first anthology of its kind, Robert Olen Butler and Phong Nguyen assemble an astounding collection of stories that cause readers to contemplate war, peace, and social justice in a new light. The fourteen stories featured in this volume explore the varied and often unexpected outcomes of violence. The authors explore the tragedies that occur closer to home--not on military battlefields but rather in places that are never meant to be battlefields, like schools and churches. The fiction reveals the violence that renders our most sacred and seemingly safest of places vulnerable.

Not a utopian project, this book asks whether literature has a role in furthering the ongoing pursuit of peace and justice for all. While exploring tragedy, these stories also offer hope for healing, illuminating how people can move forward from the moments when their lives change and how they can regain and reshape safe spaces to find solace.

In the second book in Robert Olen Butler's Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, The Star of Istanbul is a classic tale of adventure, romance, and war. World War I is in full swing, and foreign correspondent Kit Cobb has been tasked with following a German intellectual and possible secret service agent into perilous waters aboard the Lusitania. But Cobb is soon distracted from his mission by the sultry Selene Bourgani, a world-renowned actress who also appears to be working with German Intelligence. The more Cobb thinks he knows her, the less he really does, and the secrets Selene harbors have the potential to set the whole international conflict further aflame. Following the night of the infamous German U-boat attack on the Lusitania, Cobb tails Selene first into London'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, cut off from his only allies, knowing full well he may not return.

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 Engaging ... fascinating ... accompanied by the wealth of evocative detail one might expect from a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. -- Les Standiford, The Miami Herald Once again, [Butler's] language is right on the money in this alternately witty and moving meditation on value and values. -- Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor Butler has created one of the more fascinating female protagonists in recent history. -- Kirkus Reviews 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

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. --New 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
In The Deep Green Sea, Robert Olen Butler has created 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.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler's books have looked at topics as considerable and diverse as hell, extraterrestrials, and Vietnam. His acclaimed twelfth novel, A Small Hotel, chosen for O Magazine's Summer Reading List, offers a more intimate scope as it chronicles the complexities of a disintegrating relationship over the course of twenty years.

Set in contemporary New Orleans but working its way back in time, A Small Hotel follows the lives of Michael and Kelly Hays, a couple of the brink of divorce. On the day the Hays are due in court to finalize their separation, Kelly drives from her home in Pensacola and across the panhandle to New Orleans. She checks into room 303 at the Olivier House in the city's French Quarter--the hotel where she and Michael fell in love, and where she must now contemplate a startling decision that will hold devastating consequences for her family, including her nineteen-year-old daughter. Butler masterfully weaves scenes of the present with memories from the viewpoints of both Michael and Kelly--scenes that span two decades, taking the reader back to critical moments in the couple's relationship and revealing a passionate love tragically undone by miscommunication and insecurity.

The Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories represents the best in contemporary short fiction. These eleven stories, including Annie Weatherwax's prize-winning story, The Possibility of Things, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler, demonstrate the power and variety possible in this vibrant literary form.