Tabloid Dreams

"Tabloid Dreams is an unrepeatable feat, a tour de force." —The Washington Post Book World In his second collection, Tabloid Dreams, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler dazzles with his mastery of the short story and his empathy for odd and ostracized denizens of humanity. Using tabloid-headlines as inspiration—"Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis", "Woman Struck by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac", "JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction"—Butler moves from the fantastic to the realistic, exploring enduring cultural issues of exile, loss, and aspiration. The collection begins and ends with stories set on the Titanic—the first takes place while the ship sinks, the last is narrated by a survivor stuck in the Bermuda Triangle. Along the way, we meet a woman who can see through her glass eye when it’s removed from its socket, a widow who sets herself on fire after losing a baking competition, a nine-year-old hit man with a roster of murders, and a woman who meets an extraterrestrial in a Walmart parking lot and travels to outer-space on their first date. In Tabloid Dreams, Butler weaves a seamless tapestry of high and low culture, of the surreal, sordid, and humorously sad.

Robert Olen Butler has published thirteen novels and six volumes of short fiction, including A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He’s also published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream. 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. He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University.