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Using bottom-rack tabloid headlines as 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, from the lurid to the transcendent in exploring 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. Weaving a seamless tapestry of high and low culture.
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Reviews
"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 coarseness-and a reader's anticipated guffaws-into lyricism and w
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 remember-these 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