Robert Olen ButlerBesprekingen

The magic is missing, the usual magic I found in all of the other books by Mr. Butler.
His main character bored me so badly I left the book shortly after his arrival in Anchorage.
He hates New York, he hates Anchorage within five minutes of landing, he keeps flashing back to Vietnam, his ex-wife just jumped off a balcony.
Mr. Butler's other books are other worldly, and have some great humorous scenes . This story felt flat to me.
Sprinkle some cosmic magic.

A collection of short stories by an American GI (who has long taught creative writing on the college level) who served as a translator in Vietnam. He clearly is taken with the country and its people but I found it offputting that all of the stories are told by Vietnamese narrators. There’s just something about an American writing from the point of view of Vietnamese narrators that bothered me. This won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993; back then, there weren’t a lot of Vietnamese authors writing or available in English so, from that perspective, I guess it’s all understandable but it mostly left me surprised that this was a Pulitzer winner.½

This is about the effect of the war on an American family told decades after the war ended. Butler has a true knack for the way people think and talk: how we say one thing even as we are thinking another. One brother served in Vietnam and one brother fled to Canada. They’re both around 70 now and the book is about their relationship and their relationships to their parents. Very well done. A far better book than A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain. As someone who remembers that period vividly, I found it moving, evocative, and true.½

Pulitzer Prize winning author

An OK debut. His sequels are better, but this one sets the stage for the ongoing storyline. My interest lagged in the middle of the story, perhaps the book is a tad too long?

This book is not about Vietnam as much as it is about how war can affect individuals and families, fathers and sons. Butler explores a number of questions that remain after any war, but particularly after Vietnam, one being what does it mean to those men who actually fought it. Was it worth the losses and sacrifices? What constitutes bravery? cowardice? How much of what we do in life is driven by our desire to live up to the expectations of our parents? At what point is it a braver act to stand up to a parent, or to follow one's convictions, than to blindly follow the path that has been set out for you?

Vietnam was the war of my generation. I knew the men who fought it, and without exception, it changed them. I could easily relate to both Robert and Jimmy, the sons of World War II vet, William. It was a complicated time and it left scars on the American psyche. I do not think we were ever the same afterward. Butler has captured that dichotomy and the lingering effects on families perfectly. Beautifully written; surprisingly realistic.

The ideas and pointers included in this volume are excellent and worth the read. However, the format makes it a little disconcerting to follow and interpret because it is largely a set of transcripts from lectures. I would have found the book more useful had it been edited to be a real "writer's guide."

Deeply disappointing. It's a great premise - First World War veteran's reflections on his deathbed on the night Trump wins - but the slimness of the volume (well, a Kindle's always slim, but you know what I mean) suggests this isn't quite the sweeping century-and-a-bit-spanning epic you might think. The Trump angle seems entirely incidental - shades of 9/11 in My Year Of Rest And Relaxation - and the ending is pretty silly. There are neat, moving passages but it's definitely a minor work.

This is the first Butler novel I've read, and I'm impressed. His take on hell was lively and thoroughly imagined, and filled with the one-off satiric comments that I love. His characters were well-drawn, and I was particularly impressed with the independence he gave to his female characters. The contemporary comments have already made this book a snapshot of its time, but its willingness to embrace this time-sensitive satire makes it more valuable.

These stories were beautiful and tragic without cliche. As a reader of the Weekly World News in my youth, I appreciated the tenderness with which Butler treated his characters inside their exceptional storylines. And as a reader of too many established adult male authors, I enjoyed the way he treated his female characters, and the way he made them human without at all objectifying them. I also appreciated the structure of the book, with the first and final stories as bookends to the rest. These, also, were my favorites, as they were good, natural, and immersive as far as historical fiction goes.

The Vietnam War from the Vietnamese perspective. Great stories.

Fun litterary romp, featuring Christopher Marlowe, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound, Hemmingway, and Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Co in Paris. Writing is spare and forceful

Robert Olen Butler's, Late City is a powerful and moving story. Sam Cunningham at the age of 116 is being assisted in his dying by God: a loving, humane God. The title of the novel is derived from Sam's career as a newsman. The late city edition, "a last-hour chaos of fragments from an arbitrary bracket of time."

Very evocative and very sad, but the multi-page run-on sentences in the second half were extremely annoying. I was glad to finish this book, and I'm moving on to something light and silly next as an antidote.

A minor work by a great writer.

Enjoyed it but his major works are on a completely different level. If you haven’t read Butler, start with A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Tabloid Dreams or The Deep Green Sea.

i spent so much of this book confused that by the time it started making sense, i was emotionally done with it. the ending was great, though!

3.5 stars. Some scenes that could do with trimming, but other scenes are quite good.

wonderful read, eager to read the whole series

The ideas and pointers included in this volume are excellent and worth the read. However, the format makes it a little disconcerting to follow and interpret because it is largely a set of transcripts from lectures. I would have found the book more useful had it been edited to be a real "writer's guide."

Such a shallow book, this. A better title might have been The Unbearable Lightness of Being Quinlans. For the novel is so earnest and attempts to be so very deep but only gets around to posing cliched questions of old age.

And age is another matter. This book is populated by geriatrics acting like they are 19 years old. There appears to be only two stages in life, old age and unrelenting memories of Vietnam, war protests, and the 1960s. It's all so tiresome. These people never reflect on anything that occurred in the intervening 46 years between their youth and their aged existence in 2015. But they are good at endlessly eating, sipping tea, and drinking coffee, especially Robert with his damned gourmet Ethiopian beans he obsesses over. And they are excellent at moaning over their comfortable middle class existence. It's as if that 1970 film, Getting Straight, with Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen, was suddenly brought to the 21st century, with all the humor and comedy sucked out of it.

Of the writing style? It pretends. It attempts. And it fails to reflect the fracturing and fragmentation of contemporary life. Instead, it becomes an oafish, hamfisted play in shifting narrative.

One thing this novel did convince me of is that we should abolish academic tenure. That would have rid us all of the insipid Robert and Darla. And perhaps the tedium of being faced with the work of the author of this work of low end academic fiction.

The Best Small Fictions 2015 is a collection of very short fiction originally published by a variety of publications. I was asked if I would review this book by the series editor Tara L. Masih several weeks ago. I accepted because I like it when I am asked to review something that isn't a vampire apocalypse romance novel. I was not entirely sure what small fiction was about but was told there was prose poetry included. That was good enough for me.

I will say I was very surprised with this collection. I usually do not care for short stories because I feel dropped into the middle of a story and pulled out before it's over or before I completely understand what is going on. Small fiction, however, is the matchbox of fiction; no story is more than a few short pages. There is also the feeling of completeness in these shorter stories that are missing from traditional short stories. It is not Cliff Note or the Readers Digest version of a story either. There is a fullness that usually requires many more words.

The range of material is very broad along with the style and format. The shortest work is one hundred and forty characters taken from Twitter Fiction. Most stories, though, tend to be a page or two. Almost from the start I was hooked on this collection. J. Duncan Wiley's "A Notice From the Office of Reclamation", a two and a half page warning for those thinking of entering the mine, read in part:

Rocks grind their granite teeth over geologic eons, holding their grudges close. You cannot win against them. Your little flame of curiosity, infinitesimal by comparison, will gutter before it illuminates even the shallowest depths of that darkness. You will fall.

There is a rhythm and a taunting voice that leaps from the pages and expands the words into something more than simple prose. It reads like a dark fairy tale with enough detail to fill a dream.

Some stories capture real-life events and the little embarrassments that join them. Stuart Dybek's "Brisket" is such a story. The trappings of everyday life capture us when we are distracted. "Brisket" is a great story with a moral that even vegetarians like myself can enjoy. Adding to the real life theme, Naomi Telushkin and Dan Gilmore write realistic, timely tales of identity.

Not everything is light. Emma Bolden's "Before She was a Memory" touched a very real and dark place in my life. Catherine Moore's "Not About Liz" seems innocent but has a dark and creepy undertone.

These works have all been published in various places and collected as a "best of volume" much like David Lehman does with the yearly Best of American Poetry series. The sources range from Twitter, to 100 Word Story, to Black Lawrence Press, and a wide variety of other publications. Also included with this collection is an interview Phong Nguyen of Pleiades and an interview with Michael Martone who has two stories in this collection. This is truly a well-selected collection and has given me a new appreciation for small fiction. The Best Small Fictions 2015 will make you a believer in small fiction as literature.

Really immersively written book about annoying characters but done well½

The stories were interesting, but they tended to ramble without having a real conclusion or point.

Not my type of book. Finished it but skimmed the final pages. Reminded me of a Bogie movie from the 30's and '40's. Real man stuff. Like just crying out to be a movie. Does anyone care about anarchists anymore? Are the white nationalists the new anarchists?½

Like James Bond, Kit Cobb is as quick to shoot as to jump in bed with a beautiful woman. Most of the main characters are passengers on the final voyage of the Lusitania and the description and action are riveting.½