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Robert Olen Butler

Goodreads Author

Born

in Granite City, Illinois, The United States

Website

http://www.robertolenbutler.com

Genre

Literature & Fiction, Short Stories

Member Since

December 2014

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“I’ll never stop believing it: Robert Olen Butler is the best living American writer, period.”
– Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—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, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee 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 “I’ll never stop believing it: Robert Olen Butler is the best living American writer, period.”
– Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—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, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee 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 Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, 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.

His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, Greek, and most recently Chinese. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Over the past two decades he has lectured in universities, appeared at conferences, and met with writers groups in 17 countries as a literary envoy for the U. S. State Department.

He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Under the auspices of the FSU website, in the fall of 2001, he did something no other writer has ever done, before or since: he revealed his writing process in full, in real time, in a webcast that observed him in seventeen two-hour sessions write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. He also gave a running commentary on his artistic choices and spent a half-hour in each episode answering the emailed questions of his live viewers. The whole series, under the title “Inside Creative Writing” is a very popular on YouTube, with its first two-hour episode passing 125,000 in the spring of 2016.

For more than a decade he was hired to write feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. Typical of Hollywood, none of these movies ever made it to the screen.

Reflecting his early training as an actor, he has also recorded the audio books for four of his works—A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Hell, A Small Hotel and Perfume River. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree from the State University of New York system. He lives in Florida, with his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler. ...more

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Robert Olen Butler's Blog

Writing Summer, 2012

July 28th: Of all the vistas before me this past month—lush and exotic and teeming—this was the most beautiful: my writing space at 3:30 this morning. 8 hours and 45 minutes later, 1037 words.

July 26th: On flight between Istanbul & home, the vitreous in my right eye detached. Common for 67. Doc fixed small retina tear. Effects pass. But deadline for my novel looms & I need

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Robert Olen Butler’s books

Average rating: 3.78 · 26,353 ratings · 3,415 reviews · 86 distinct works • Similar authors

	A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain 3.95 avg rating — 9,346 ratings — published 1992 — 44 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction by Robert Olen Butler (Goodreads Author), Janet Burroway (Editor) 3.96 avg rating — 1,543 ratings — published 2005 — 11 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Small Hotel 3.39 avg rating — 1,736 ratings — published 2011 — 18 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Hell 3.40 avg rating — 1,718 ratings — published 2009 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Perfume River 3.59 avg rating — 1,605 ratings — published 2016 — 18 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Hot Country (Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller #1) 3.65 avg rating — 916 ratings — published 2012 — 22 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Star of Istanbul (Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller #2) 3.77 avg rating — 822 ratings — published 2013 — 15 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Late City 4.03 avg rating — 762 ratings — published 2021 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Severance 3.63 avg rating — 712 ratings — published 2006 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Paris in the Dark (Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller, #4) 3.76 avg rating — 686 ratings — published 2018 — 11 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Series by Robert Olen Butler

Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (4 books)
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Robert Olen Butler (Goodreads Author)

3.75 avg rating — 2,807 ratings

Quotes by Robert Olen Butler (?)

“The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.”
― Robert Olen Butler

tags: artist

11 likes

“there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn’t. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn’t.”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

5 likes

“The monitor presently shows the Windows Blue Screen of Death, though this does not alarm him, as the BSoD is the universal screen saver in Hell.”
― Robert Olen Butler, Hell

tags: hell, humor, windows

5 likes

See all Robert Olen Butler's quotes »

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message 1: by James

Apr 13, 2015 03:01PM

Hi Robert,

I'm getting a promotion together to give authors a chance to use my new suite of embellished eBook tools to compete in a contest. I hope to get Hugh Howey and Amanda Hocking to judge it with me, and I am also getting a few "prime" authors like yourself to try out the ePub3 Creator Studio for free. You will be able to embellish your title with the tools we have and then you can sell it in the store for whatever price you select. You keep 85% (better than Amazon). This is a deal worth $50. In fact, if you like the app (it contains an eReader, an Author and Reader Forum, and the ePub3 Creator Studio with full back-end Admin with User and Store controls) you can purchase a self-install for that price, and then you keep 100% of the profits. The tutorials are right inside the epub studio, so let me know if you want to give it a spin around the block and I'll get you a login and password for premium Admin access. You can login with basic access here: https://emrepublishing.com/creator/

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