"Were I to recommend a single volume that poignantly shows the magnitude and the humanity of the tragedy, it would be this one."-John Clark Pratt, Univ. of Colorado.
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Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Butler's 15 stories, set in the Vietnamese enclaves of suburban New Orleans, capture the voices of people who have lost their homeland and are trying to adapt to an alien culture. Named by PW as one of the best books of 1992. (June)
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In a short span of time, many Vietnamese immigrants to the United States have quietly made good in their adopted country. Butler, who served in Vietnam as a translator, now has given this silent community a voice. The first-person narrators in these tales explore both the old country and the new (primarily Louisiana), as well as the realm of the spirits. Each story unfolds like a delicate paper fan, with startling, ghostly images hiding in every crevice. While many writers have finely described the daily grind of the immigrant experience, Butler has gone one step further, evoking the collective unconscious of a displaced population. Recommended for all literary fiction collections and essential for libraries seeking to expand Asian American literature collections.-- Rita Ciresi, Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park
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Robert Olen Butler is a novelist, screenwriter, educator, and short-story writer who grew up in Granite City, Illinois.
Butler served in Vietnam. Following the Vietnam War, Butler began writing. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, and The Saturday Review, as well as in four annual editions of the Best American Short Stories and six annual editions of New Stories of the South. A collection of his stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler's novels include The Alleys of Eden, Countrymen of Bones, and Sun Dogs. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Butler also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches creative writing at McNeese State University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
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