Intercourse: Stories - Hardcover

Robert Olen Butler, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, is the author of many lauded works of fiction. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

*Starred Review* Death was the catalyst for Butler’s astounding collection Severance (2006). Now sex inspires a similarly daring cycle of concentrated inner monologues. As always, Butler broaches matters of mystery and profundity, but here he gives full rein to his gift for satire. The array of mythic and real-life couples is itself a source of much wonder and merriment, which is compounded by the carefully researched yet often hard-to-believe circumstances of their sexual encounters. But what makes these scenes so searingly vivid is Butler’s convincing choreography of physical intimacy and mental divergence. Babe Ruth, for instance, replays his first home run in his imagination, while prostitute Josephine endures the “yawps and grunts” of “this overgrown boy” by envisioning herself dancing with a classy “Uptown” man. Mordantly funny takes on the endless battles between men and women and body and soul alternate with uncanny insights into the politics of desire, the fortress of loneliness, and the spectrum of lust, bliss, terror, and indifference. Much thought, imagination, and empathy is at work as Butler portrays Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, Milton Berle and Aimee McPherson, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and 45 other unlikely yet inevitable pairs. Beautiful and sad, chilling and hilarious. --Donna Seaman