Robert Olen Butler

Explorers and early settlers -- The general history of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles / John Smith -- The history and present state of Virginia / Robert Beverley -- Of Plymouth Plantation / William Bradford -- "A model of Christian charity" / John Winthrop -- "In memory of my dear grandchild Anne Bradstreet" / Anne Bradstreet -- "The minister's black veil" / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Voices of a revolution -- "Sinners in the hands of an angry God" / Jonathan Edwards -- "The way to wealth" / Benjamin Franklin -- "Considerations on keeping Negroes" / John Woolman -- "The last of the Mohicans: a narrative of 1757" / James Fenimore Cooper -- Common sense / Thomas Paine -- Declaration of independence / Thomas Jefferson -- personal letters / John Adams & Abigail Adams -- The search for a national identity -- "On the emigration to America and peopling the western country" / Philip Freneau -- "Federalist no.2" / John Jay -- "The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano" / Olaudah Equiano -- The history of the Lewis and Clark expedition / Meriwether Lewis & William Clark -- A tour on the prairies / Washington Irving -- "Tecumseh's plea to the Choctaws and the Chickasaws" / Tecumseh -- The shackles of power: three Jeffersonian decades / John Dos Passos. A confident nation -- "The young American" / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- "Resistance to civil government" / Henry David Thoreau -- Woman in the nineteenth century / Margaret Fuller -- "Great are the myths" / Walt Whitman -- "Annexation" / John L. O'Sullivan -- Personal memoirs / Juan Nepomuceno Seguin -- Slavery and the abolition movement -- Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass / Frederick Douglass -- Incidents in the life of a slave girl / Harriet Jacobs -- Uncle Tom's cabin / Harrriet Beecher Stowe -- Sociology for the South / George Fitzhugh -- "Appeal to the Christian women of the South" / Angelina Grimke Weld -- "The hunters of men" / John Greenleaf Whittier -- Civil war and reconstruction -- "The portent" / Herman Melville -- The red badge of courage: an episode of the American Civil War / Stephen Crane -- "Hospital sketches" / Louisa May Alcott -- "O Captain! My Captain!" / Walt Whitman -- "Up from slavery" / Booker T. Washington -- The souls of Black folk / W.E.B. DuBois. Industrializing America -- The closing of the frontier -- O pioneers! / Willa Cather -- "Chiquita" / Bret Harte -- The life and adventure of Nat Love, better known in the cattle country as Deadwood Dick / Nat Love -- "Kansas I" / A Mexican Folk Ballad -- "The passing of the buffalo" / Hamlin Garland -- Black Elk speaks / Black Elk -- Artists render industrialization and urbanization -- "What the engines said" / Bret Harte -- "Life in the iron mills" / Rebecca Harding Davis -- The age of innocence / Edith Wharton -- "Proem: to Brooklyn Bridge" / Hart Crane -- Yekl: a tale of the New York ghetto / Abraham Cahan -- "Chicago" / Carl Sandburg -- Social critics and reformers -- "We are all bound up together" / Francis E. Watkins Harper -- Eighty years and more: reminiscences 1815-1897 / Elizabeth Cady Stanton -- "A church mouse" / Mary Wilkins Freeman -- Huckleberry Finn / Samuel L. Clemens -- The shame of the cities / Lincoln Steffens -- The jungle / Upton Sinclair. Americans abroad and World War I -- The portrait of a lady / Henry James -- "The white man's burden" / Rudyard Kipling -- "The real 'white man's burden'" / Ernest Crosby -- "Hallelujahs" / Jose de Diego -- One of ours / Willa Cather -- "next to of course god america i" / E. E. Cummings -- Democracy and adversity -- The jazz age -- The great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- "Song of perfect propriety" / Dorothy Parker -- The flivver king / Upton Sinclair -- Jazz / Toni Morrison -- "The weary blues" / Langston Hughes -- Their eyes were watching God / Zora Neale Hurston -- The Great Depression and the New Deal -- The big money / John Dos Passos -- Waiting for Lefty / Clifford Odets -- "Women on the breadlines" / Meridel LeSueur -- The grapes of wrath / John Steinbeck -- "Colonial Park" / Ralph Ellison -- "Proud day" / Genevieve Taggard. World War II -- "Freedom" / E. B. White -- Battle cry / Leon Uris -- Farewell to Manzanar / Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston -- "Apostrophe to the land" / Countee Cullen -- The face of war / Martha Gellhorn -- Night / Elie Wiesel -- Hiroshima / John Hershey -- The challenges of power -- Prosperity and anxiety -- An American childhood / Annie Dillard -- The man in the gray flannel suit / Sloan Wilson -- On the road / Jack Kerouac -- Coming of age in Mississippi / Anne Moody -- The cruicible / Arthur Miller -- The right stuff / Tom Wolfe -- Rights and revolutions -- "Letter from a Birmingham jail" / Martin Luther King, Jr. -- "Message to the grass roots" / Malcolm X -- "Why I want a wife" / Judy Brady -- The house on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros -- Lakota woman / Mary Crow Dog -- "Blowin' in the wind" / Bob Dylan -- The Vietnam years -- One very hot day / David Halberstam -- Going after Cacciato / Tim O'Brien -- "Life at war" / Denise Levertov -- American pastoral / Philip Roth -- "Letters from my father" / Robert Olen Butler.

Christopher Marlowe ("Kit") Cobb, an American war correspondent reporting on World War I, has been tasked to follow a man named Brauer, a German intellectual and possible covert SS agent, into perilous waters aboard the ship Lusitania, as the man is believed to hold information vital to the war effort. Aboard the Lusitania on its fateful voyage, Cobb becomes smitten with famed actress Selene Bourgani, who for some reason appears to be working with German Intelligence.

Christopher Marlowe ("Kit") Cobb, an early 20th-century American war correspondent reporting on Mexico's civil war, witnesses the attempted assassination of a priest and the arrival of strange ships bearing German officials.

"In the thrilling third installment of the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, Kit discovers a secret plan to transform Zeppelins into dangerous killing machines--and to turn the tide of war in Germany's favor" -- "[I]t is 1917, and the United States is wavering on the brink of war. Kit [Christopher Marlowe Cobb] is now a full-blown spy in England, working undercover in a castle on the Kentish coast owned by a suspected British government mole named Sir Albert Stockman. And Kit again has a female spy to deal with--his own mother, the beautiful and mercurial Isabel Cobb, who also happens to be one of the world's most famous stage actresses. Starring in a touring production of Hamlet, Isabel's offstage role is to seduce the supposed mole, while Kit, also undercover, is working to figure out Stockman's secret agenda. The situation is further complicated when Isabel finds herself falling in love with the villainous Stockman. As Kit follows his mother and her escort from the relative safety of Britain into the lion's den of Berlin, he must stay undercover, even under the very nose of the Kaiser" --

The Vietnam War continues to play itself out in fiction, autobiography, and history books, but no American author has captured the experiences of the Vietnamese themselves--and caught their voices--more tellingly than Robert Olen Butler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain. The 15 stories collected here, all written in the first person, blend Vietnamese folklore, the terrible, lingering memories of war, American pop culture and family drama.

La rencontre d'une jeune Vietnamienne, Tien, qui se croit orpheline depuis 1975 et un vétéran américain, Ben, qui revient dans un pays déchiré pour clore son histoire et prendre la mesure de la paix. Morceau par morceau, ils reconstituent le passé. Or Ben a eu une liaison avec une prostituée en 1966, dans la rue où habitait la mère de Tien qui, elle-même, a eu Tien, de père américain ...

A tale set in reverse chronicles the failing marriage of New Orleans residents Michael and Kelly Hayes, who, on the day their divorce becomes final, revisit their shared history to evaluate the insecurities and inabilities that have driven them apart.

"The night before the turn of the millennium, a tour bus bound for a Louisiana casino is suddenly beamed inside a spaceship hovering high above the Earth's surface. As its twelve passengers emerge nervously from the vehicle, they come face-to-face with the being who has brought them aboard, a sixteen-fingered zoot-suited alien named Desi. Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, Desi will seek their help as he readies himself for the final phase of the mysterious mission he has traveled across the galaxies to fulfill.". "For decades, Desi has patiently studied the curious primary species of our planet, absorbing human culture from afar and occasionally bringing a chosen few aboard his ship to read their thoughts and experience their emotions with his telepathic powers. Over time, he has come to love Earth's confusing, fascinating, and frustrating inhabitants - and even taken a human wife, a gregarious former hairdresser from Alabama named Edna Bradshaw.". "Now, to complete his mission, Desi must position his ship in full and irrefutable view of the people of Earth and descend to the planet's surface at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve."--BOOK JACKET.

A collection of short fiction inspired by postcards from a bygone era and their messages offers fifteen pieces, including "Carl and I," "The Ironworkers' Hayride," and "The One in White."

Robert Quinlan is a seventy-year-old historian teaching at Florida State University, where his wife Darla is also tenured. Their marriage, forged in the fervor of anti-Vietnam War protests, now bears the fractures of time, both personal and historical, with the couple trapped in an existence of morning coffee and solitary jogging and separate offices. For Robert and Darla, the cracks remain under the surface, whereas the divisions in Robert's own family are more apparent: he has almost no relationship with his brother Jimmy, who became estranged from the family as the Vietnam War intensified. Robert and Jimmy's father, a veteran of WWII, is coming to the end of his life, and aftershocks of war ripple across their lives once again when Jimmy refuses to appear at his father's bedside. And an unstable homeless man whom Robert at first takes to be a fellow Vietnam veteran turns out to have a deep impact not just on Robert, but on his entire family.

Pulitzer-winning Butler presents 62 stories, each exactly 240 words long, capturing the flow of thoughts and feelings that go through a person's mind after their head has been severed. The characters are both real and imagined, including Medusa and Anne Boleyn.

In The Deep Green Sea, Robert Olen Butler has created a memorable and incandescent love story between a contemporary Vietnamese woman orphaned in 1975, when Saigon finally fell to the Communists, and a Vietnam veteran who returns from America to a once war-torn land, seeking closure and a measure of peace. Bit by bit they learn more of each other's pasts. Secrets are revealed: Ben's love affair with a Vietnamese prostitute in 1966; Tien's mixed racial heritage and her abandonment by her bar-girl mother, who feared retribution from the North Vietnamese for having given birth to one of the hated "children of dust." In Butler's hands, what follows conjures the stuff of classical tragedy and also achieves a classic reconciliation of once-warring cultures.

A collection of short fiction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author offers a revealing look at what goes through a person's mind during sex as he captures the innermost thoughts of such couples as Bonnie and Clyde, Adam and Eve, and Richard Milhous Nixon and Pat Nixon.

Depicts the rise of the porn industry and prostitution in New York City in the nineteen seventies and eighties.