Robert Olen Butler

Dubbed by one critic as the “best living American writer,” Robert Olen Butler is the author of numerous novels and short story collections. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (2001) won the Pulitzer Prize: the 15 stories capture the voices of Vietnamese immigrants who have lost their homeland and are trying to adapt to an alien culture. A Small Hotel (2012) is a beautifully told story of love, loss, and redemption. Butler's other novels are: The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, and Hell. His volumes of short fiction include: Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, and Weegee Stories. He has also published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway.

Butler's next book, The Hot Country, begins The Christopher Marlowe Cobb thriller series, and was published fall 2012 by Otto Penzler's The Mysterious Press at Grove/Atlantic. It is told in the voice of a swashbuckling early 20th century American newspaper war correspondent, whose voice Butler created for the story “The One in White” in Had a Good Time. Printed in the Atlantic Monthly, that story won (along with the Atlantic) a National Magazine Award in fiction. The Hot Country is set in Mexico in April and May of 1914, during that country’s civil war and the American invasion of Vera Cruz. The second novel in the series will be published in the fall of 2013.

A recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, 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. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have also been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, and eight annual editions of New Stories from the South.