Tabloid Dreams - Softcover

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 coarseness--and a reader's anticipated guffaws--into 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 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 "Out of pop culture, Robert Olen Butler extracts a result that looks uncomplicated, but subtly reveals many of the preoccupations of American literature--especially loneliness, conformity and innocence." --The Boston Globe "These stories are masterpieces of accessible complexity--jewels 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 Garc a M rquez 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 prose--Butler 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

"An unrepeatable feat, a tour de force." --The Washington Post Book World In Tabloid Dreams, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler dazzles with his mastery of the short story and his empathy for eccentric and ostracized characters. Using tabloid headlines as inspiration--"Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis," "Woman Struck by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac," and "JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction"--Butler moves from the fantastic to the realistic, exploring enduring concepts of exile, loss, aspiration, and the search for self. Along the way, the cast includes a woman who can see through her glass eye when it's removed from the socket, a widow who sets herself on fire after losing a baking competition, a nine-year-old hit man, and a woman who dates an extraterrestrial she met in a Walmart parking lot. Tabloid Dreams weaves a seamless tapestry of high and low culture, of the surreal, sordid, and humorously sad.