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Tabloid Dreams: Stories Kindle Edition

by Robert Olen Butler (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 25 ratings

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There are a dozen ways the American Dream can go awry in this “unrepeatable . . . tour de force” of short fiction from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author (The Washington Post Book World).

“[With] touches of Italo Calvino, Roald Dahl, and Gabriel García Márquez” the Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award–winning author dazzles with his mastery of the short story and his ability to find humor and humanity in the extremes of the American way (San Francisco Chronicle).

Using tabloid headlines for inspiration—among them, “Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis,” “Woman Struck by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac,” and “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed”—Butler moves from the fantastic to the realistic, and from the lurid to the transcendent, as he explores exile, loss, aspiration, and the search for self. Along the way, we meet a wife who uses her glass eye to spy on her cheating husband; a widow who sets herself on fire after losing a baking competition; a nine-year-old hit man; a woman who dates an extraterrestrial she met at Walmart; and a furtive and mournful JFK who survived the assassination.

“Butler peels back the sleazy veneer of the sensational to expose characters who long for love and the healing comfort of human compassion” —USA Today

“Read all about it: if you’re frustrated by the way nothing much seems to happen in modern short fiction, you’ll find Tabloid Dreams a whole different story.” —The New York Times Book Review

“These stories are masterpieces.” —South Florida Sun-Sentinel

“Tabloid Dreams is full-blown American magical realism.” —Boston Review

From the Publisher


	LATE CITY	A SMALL HOTEL	A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN	PERFUME RIVER

Customer Reviews	165	401	707	7
Price	$17.00	$12.43	$15.99	$10.97
	A 115-year-old man lies on his deathbed as the 2016 election results arrive, and revisits his life in this moving story of love, fatherhood, and the American century.	Olen Butler's acclaimed, intimate twelfth novel, chronicling the complexities of a disintegrating relationship over the course of twenty years.	The Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of lyrical and poignant stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its enduring impact on the Vietnamese.	A powerful novel about the way the Vietnam War divided families, and a layered portrayal of marriage, brotherhood, and the sum of a life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Tabloid Dreams:

"It is Mr. Butler’s genius in this volume to lure an audience into the tent by shouting versions of the tabloids’ headlines . . . and then providing more than the customer has been led to expect. Turning the lurid third-person titles of his stories into direct testimony from the principles, Mr. Butler often transforms the material’s coarsenessand a reader’s anticipated guffawsinto lyricism and wonder." The New York Times Book Review

"These stories are a real achievement and a true surprise . . . Butler peels back the sleazy veneer of the sensational to expose characters who long for love and the healing comfort of human compassion." USA Today

"To see, to know, to touch, to rememberthese desires have always been at the heart of great fiction. They are here in abundance, along with the skewed and comic tenderness that is Butler’s greatest gift as a writer. You start to read these stories and laugh; then, sucker-punched, you see the sadness and sweetness in each one." The Times-Picayune

"Out of pop culture, Robert Olen Butler extracts a result that looks uncomplicated, but subtly reveals many of the preoccupations of American literatureespecially loneliness, conformity and innocence." The Boston Globe

"These stories are masterpieces of accessible complexityjewels of poignancy molded from what is generally considered a slag heap of modern culture. Tabloid Dreams is a magnificent work of imagination, entertainment and humanity." Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

"Daring and uncommonly beautiful literary flights of fancy. There are touches of Italo Calvino, Roald Dahl, and Gabriel García Márquez in them. At the same time, Tabloid Dreams couldn’t be more American in premise, flavor and humor . . . [it] makes its dozen fanciful tales not just real to its readers, but also sublimely reasonable." San Francisco Chronicle

"A hugely entertaining, sometimes dazzling collection from one of our most versatile writers." Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"There’s a beautiful liquidity both to Butler’s prose and to his imagination. Sex and death hold hands and dance in Tabloid Dreams . . . And yet these aren’t sad stories. They’re too funny for that. And in almost every one, there’s a moment of transcendence; for every character, redemption glimmers." Wisconsin State Journal

"Butler has taken a ham’s material and fashioned it into a dozen artful and wondrous tales, once again proving himself to be the rarest kind of writer, one who can’t be pigeonholed, who doesn’t rely on a set, safe shtick but keeps challenging himself with new and varied material." Chicago Tribune

"Straightforward, surreal, hilarious, shocking and ultimately very moving . . . It’s hard to imagine another writer who could achieve such pathos, humor and intensity from such an absurd situation . . . Playwrights come first to mind: Ionesco and Beckett." St. Petersburg Times

"Every story in this collection deserves a prize. Originality, humor, distinctive voices, drop-dead proseButler possesses all these qualities, and he lends them to every story." The Hudson Review

"Butler has a remarkable facility for finding the heart in otherwise trashy lives . . . In trash, suggests Butler, there can always be transcendence." The Village Voice

"Tabloid Dreams is full-blown American magical realism: funny, lyrical, striking, its stories seek and find meaning in our very own myths, the ones we characteristically reinvent every few years to fit our fears and fantasies . . . Butler and his characters convince us that concepts such as conscience, justice, and love are meaningful and necessary, even in a culture whose stock-in-trade is bunk." Boston Book Review

About the Author

Robert Olen Butler has published thirteen novels, six story collections, and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. In addition to a Pulitzer Prize and two National Magazine Awards, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction and an NEA grant, as well as the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B009W741NO
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Press; Reprint edition (March 12, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 12, 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3497 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 210 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #761,335 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #173 in Absurdist Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #399 in Absurdist Fiction (Books)
- #796 in Literary Short Stories

Customer Reviews:
4.3 25 ratings

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Michelle S. Creel

wonderful

Reviewed in the United States on July 1, 2013

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I chose this as part of my summer-read agenda and look forward to reading this book. I heard the wring was well-considered.

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Doctor Moss

The Surreal and the Real

Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2021

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Robert Olen Butler isn’t an obscure writer (he’s won a Pulitzer after all), but I discovered him late. Now he’s on my “definitely read” list.

This is a collection of short stories (twelve altogether) around the theme of tabloid headlines. Each story is titled like a tabloid story (e.g.“, Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis”) and the title is placed in quotation marks, just to make sure we get the idea.

The thing is that, if the tabloid stories were true, they wouldn’t in reality be so tabloidish. These would be real people, in very strange circumstances, experiencing very strange events, as real human beings would experience them.

The jealous husband who returns to life as a parrot, only to be adopted by his ex-wife — he watches from his (admittedly comfortable) cage as his ex-wife carries on with the same rangy love life she pursued while he was alive and they were married.

It’s not about the sensationalism — it’s about the humanity that would lie behind the tabloid story.

There is dark humor in the stories, and always the recipe of distance and empathy that makes each one surreal on the factual level and real on the emotional level. The result is a light reading experience that you can take as deep as you’d like in your own reflections.

The first and last stories are bookends (sorry for the pun — it just happened that way). They provide a kind of artifice that’s in keeping with the tone of the book — a surreal literary enclosure.

They provide complementary perspectives on the disaster of the Titanic, one from a man who dies after doing his best, bound to his time and place, to offer some comfort and help to a single woman, seeing her to the lifeboats. He is reborn fittingly in water (hence the title, “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed”).

And the other of course is the woman, who offers her experience of the man’s somewhat awkward, time-bound comfort and aid-giving. She is propelled forward into a future, a woman feeling unbound now from that specific time and place (“Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle”).

I looked for something by Butler after reading his Hell and having it come back to mind over the several years since I read it. Hoping for the same with this one, and with more by him.

Helpful

Charlotte H. Huggins Esq.

Amazing stories. Incredibly creative

Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2015

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Amazing stories. Incredibly creative, funny and overall superlative writing.

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Bookmonster

Crazy premise for a book but he pulls it off.

Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2014

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Quirky and enjoyable book, makes serious literary stories out of preposterous supermarket tabloid headlines. Good job. will seek out another by same author.

Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2015

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Wonderful book of short stories by a talented writer.

Helpful