Robert Olen Butler's Blog
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Oct.05.2010
I first read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on a balcony of the Hotel Metropole in Saigon on three summer evenings in 1971. The tropical air was heavy and full of the smells of cordite and motorcycle exhaust and rotting fish and wood-fire stoves, and the horizon flared ambiguously,...
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Apr.09.2010
J. P. Sartre & J. Goebbels drink ape-piss tea in fetid bistro, wondering if they might’ve done differently without a walleye, a club foot
Swore by Stalin, mollified Hitler, Che & Chamberlain bake together in a low-temperature oven: damned if you do & damned if you don’t
Those who...
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Feb.19.2010
There are no animals. Seeing balcony railings, park benches, window ledges in the Great Metropolis, everyone aches at the memory of birds
Montezuma stuffs tacos for throngs at Taco Bell, wearing flayed skin of Cortés, the rest of whom waits hopelessly nearby for golden fries
On tube, “The Genghis...
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Feb.19.2010
When you ask a publisher what sells books, he or she will hem and haw and say that they do a lot of things to try to sell books, but honestly they don’t know if any of that works. What really works, the publisher will say, is “word of mouth.” But that declaration inevitably brings a shrug. Who...
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Nov.17.2009
A few weeks ago I noticed a green anole squeeze into the driver-door outside mirror of my car. It did not occur to me that he actually lived in there until this past weekend, when I took a four-day, three-night, 1200-mile book tour road trip from my home to a gig at Florida State College in Venice...
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Nov.09.2009
Any writer who, midway through his publishing career, makes his way to Hell, the straight way of his life having been lost, must go there in the footsteps of Dante Alighieri and his man Virgil. I first read Inferno on the balcony of my room at the Metropole Hotel in Saigon in 1971. It was the...
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Aug.25.2009
I'm delighted to join the Red Room community, and I have a favor to ask of my new writer and reader friends, both here at Red Room and visiting from cyberspace. I have been following a creative track for quite a long while now that has delivered me, I believe, deeply into the world of fantasy. It...
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About Robert Olen
Robert Olen Butlerhas published eleven novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, and Hell—and five volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had...
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