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Fair Warning
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author's "strange and finally beautiful tale about obsession and modern love" (Beth Kephart, The Baltimore Sun).
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).
"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
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).
"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
224 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2002
9 people are currently reading
99 people want to read
About the author
Robert Olen Butler
86 books456 followers“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.
– 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.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
October 2, 2011
Disappointing considering the author. Characters felt forced and trite. What women describe themselves as such? "The sunlight surely had made my finely-textured, newly light ash blond hair diaphanously beautiful." What????
September 1, 2025
not a big fan of this work
June 27, 2019
Lesson learned - just becuase a book has won an award does not mean one should buy it impulsively and read it.
Terribly trite and an inconsequential plot makes for an unusually boring and wildly lame book. Avoid at all costs
Terribly trite and an inconsequential plot makes for an unusually boring and wildly lame book. Avoid at all costs
July 20, 2008
I wish I had seen the Goodreads reviews before impulsively buying and reading this book. I had previously enjoyed Robert Olen Butler's short stories, and was impressed by the first line of this book: "Perhaps my fate was sealed when I sold my three-year old sister." It has the potential for an interesting story, but I guess I wasn't that interested in the lush description of the auction items, and the symbolism only partially worked for me.
March 8, 2019
This book was a pure impulse grab so far out of my usual realm of books that I’m a little shocked at myself.
I also feel that rather disqualifies me from offering a valuable opinion!
I rather enjoyed the first half of the book...I was hopeful that there would be info about the world of high end auctions and there sort of was.
The weird thing about this book was that it was written by a man but it tried so hard to be all girly and emotional. Being a guy, I thought some of that was plausible but also found myself distracted wondering if a woman reader would be scoffing at some of the stuff.
The last half of the book was spent wondering how she was going to fuck everything up in her own twisted head and, sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.
This book did not make me want to read anymore chick books with pretensions of “literature”.
Also, why did she seem to be flying coach to Paris? It’s not definitive that she was, but since there was a small scene on the plane, I really think we ought to have been told one way or another. I have no idea why that bugs me so much. If Alain booked her in coach, THAT would have been the deal breaker, not a bunch of old pictures. Jeez.
I also feel that rather disqualifies me from offering a valuable opinion!
I rather enjoyed the first half of the book...I was hopeful that there would be info about the world of high end auctions and there sort of was.
The weird thing about this book was that it was written by a man but it tried so hard to be all girly and emotional. Being a guy, I thought some of that was plausible but also found myself distracted wondering if a woman reader would be scoffing at some of the stuff.
The last half of the book was spent wondering how she was going to fuck everything up in her own twisted head and, sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.
This book did not make me want to read anymore chick books with pretensions of “literature”.
Also, why did she seem to be flying coach to Paris? It’s not definitive that she was, but since there was a small scene on the plane, I really think we ought to have been told one way or another. I have no idea why that bugs me so much. If Alain booked her in coach, THAT would have been the deal breaker, not a bunch of old pictures. Jeez.
May 5, 2023
Butler is a sexy writer. His prose is like foreplay, leading to a denouement one does not see coming until the last few pages. Amy Dickerson is an auctioneer extraordinaire, so in tune with her merchandise and her buyers that she has lost sight of herself. People float in and out of her life, and the only constants are the merchandise and the buyers. Go along on Butler's ride; I promise you will like it.
August 21, 2017
Brilliant first line, gorgeous imagery. For that it gets three stars. The first half of the book really pulled me along. I loved it. But sometime after the halfway point, it started to lose me. It didn't quite come together at the end. It left me feeling empty... Which was the point perhaps but not what I was looking to feel. An intellectual read rather than a sensual/emotional one.
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April 19, 2020I couldn't do it. The way it begins, atop wealth and privilege, didn't seem to set it up for a very wide emotional arc or much opportunity for genuine character transformation.
February 18, 2021
I have loved other Robert Olen Butler books, but this was a disappointment. Too many plot lines that never fit together,
December 3, 2023
This story started at 100mph---and then by half way had slowed to a walk. A good premise from one of my favourite authors ---but disappointing.
6.5/10
6.5/10
December 2, 2015
It's a literary/character study book, so don't go into it expecting action and fireworks and Harry Potter. However, I adore this book, it's one of my favourites. Damn can Robert Olen Butler turn a phrase. Re: Amy not being believable...I found her surprisingly easy to identify with. But yeah, brusque, hormonal, kind of a hardass, I can see how that might put people off.
I especially loved this book when we got to reading the Rape of the Lock. And high school me thought ROB was such a smart dude.
EDIT: I kind of want to change the rating and knock it down a star or so, but I can't quite bring myself to do it. There's no way I read it in January 2004. I would've been 12. My preteen reading habits will never cease to surprise.
I especially loved this book when we got to reading the Rape of the Lock. And high school me thought ROB was such a smart dude.
EDIT: I kind of want to change the rating and knock it down a star or so, but I can't quite bring myself to do it. There's no way I read it in January 2004. I would've been 12. My preteen reading habits will never cease to surprise.
November 15, 2009
This wasn't terrible, nor was it good. I was interested in the profession of the main character: fine arts auctioneer. I also enjoyed the musings about consumer culture at the high end: How we define ourselves by our possessions. But the character of Amy Dickerson just wasn't credible. I had a sense of a puppeteer at work throughout my experience of reading it. I'd like to see how Robert Butler handles a male protagonist. I'm not sure whether the female point of view was troublesome for him, or the subject matter. The plot had something of a soap-opera quality to it.
June 4, 2008
Robert Olen Butler is indubitably a great writer, but not with this book. i just couldn't get into the main character auctioneer Amy and her sexual urges. she should act on those urges more often maybe. "Mr. Spaceman" is much better as is "A good scent from a strange mountain", which is a 5 star and then some.
January 22, 2017
"Rated R for adult themes and language." I agree with Kirkus Reviews " a bracing antidote to the legions of helplessly neurotic heroines cluttering up novels of late". The first sentence caught my attention "Perhaps my fate was sealed when I sold my three-year-old sister." Just gets better from there.
March 8, 2011
I have not read a Butler for so long, I forget how he makes you read slowly...
An evocative exploration of the coming of age of a 40 year old, where the things which made you sweat as a teenager, still work on you25 years later.
An evocative exploration of the coming of age of a 40 year old, where the things which made you sweat as a teenager, still work on you25 years later.
January 24, 2016
I was interested in learning more about the ways of auction houses and bidding in a fictional story. Unfortunately this did not meet my expectation. I should not get my hopes up when something is billed as a romance. Story line was flimsy.
May 1, 2008
OK--nothing truly compelling---female high-end auctioneer
Romantic
Romantic
April 9, 2009
I didn't find the characters very compelling... the story never really gets going.
December 29, 2009
My love of antiques and estate sales kept me intersted in the ideas what people collect as seen thru the eyes of an auctioneer. The relationships were very soap operaesque.
August 21, 2012
Quick read but didn't hold my interest. Characters were not developed very well-kept waiting for it to be a good story but it just didn't happen!
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March 5, 2013I'm afraid this left me entirely cold.
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August 17, 2013Read 6/02
October 7, 2014
Couldn't really connect with Amy. She's a terrible sister and I'm so over all these female characters with fabulous art jobs.
March 14, 2015
Though occasionally overwritten, this is a wonderful character study and an interesting novella.
August 10, 2016
Light reading with a glimpse into the world of auctions.
October 14, 2012
Finally, a Butler story that's not about Vietnam. Interesting story, somewhat uneven writing.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews