Short stories by Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels The Alleys of EdenSun DogsCountrymen of BonesOn Distant GroundWabashThe DeuceThey WhisperThe Deep Green SeaMr. SpacemanFair WarningHell,A Small HotelThe Hot CountryThe Star of IstanbulThe Empire of Night, Perfume Riverand six volumes of short fictionTabloid Dreams, Had a Good TimeSeverance, IntercourseWeegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway. In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New YorkerEsquireHarper'sThe Atlantic MonthlyGQZoetropeThe Paris ReviewGranta, The Hudson ReviewThe Virginia Quarterly ReviewPloughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, several other major annual anthologies, and numerous college literature textbooks from such publishers as Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking, Little Brown & Co., Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.Martin and most recently in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford.

Listing 4 stories.

A Vietnamese near-centenarian living in New Orleans reminisces on wars he experienced, ideas he held, and countries he saw during the 20th century with the help of the ghost of an old friend: Ho Chi Minh.

A man who was a jealous husband in his past life now inhabits the body of a parrot. His wife buys him from a pet store, and he is forced to watch her from his cage as she brings other men home, again and again.

After killing a lost American soldier, a Vietnamese man discovers similarities between the two of them and struggles to come to terms with his hasty decision.

A man picks up his wife's grandfather from the airport after years of separation. However, the man must comfort his wife when she realizes her grandfather's memory is failing and he no longer recognizes her.