Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards
by Robert Olen Butler
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Description
"Gloriously imaginative and utterly hypnotizing short stories" inspired by vintage twentieth-century postcards, from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (Booklist, starred review).For many years, author Robert Olen Butler has collected picture postcards from the early twentieth century—not so much for the pictures on the fronts but for the messages written on the backs, little bits of the captured souls of people long since passed away. Using these brief messages of real people from another show more age, Butler here creates fully imagined stories that speak to the universal human condition.
In "Up by Heart," a Tennessee miner is called upon to become a preacher, and then asked to complete an altogether more sinister task. In "The Ironworkers' Hayride," a young man named Milton embarks on a romantic adventure with a girl with a wooden leg. From the deeply moving "Carl and I," in which a young wife writes a postcard in reply to a card from her husband who is dying of tuberculosis, to the eerily familiar "The One in White," in which a newspaper reporter covers an incident of American military adventurism in a foreign land, these short stories are intimate and fascinating glimpses into the lives of ordinary people in an extraordinary age.
"A wonderful collection."—The Atlantic Monthly
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This book was disappointing. None of the stories or characters rang true.
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Author Information
44+ Works 5,068 Members
Robert Olen Butler is a novelist, screenwriter, educator, and short-story writer who grew up in Granite City, Illinois. Butler served in Vietnam. Following the Vietnam War, Butler began writing. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, and The Saturday Review, as well as in four annual editions of the Best American show more Short Stories and six annual editions of New Stories of the South. A collection of his stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler's novels include The Alleys of Eden, Countrymen of Bones, and Sun Dogs. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Butler also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches creative writing at McNeese State University. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2004
- Dedication
- For Elizabeth Dewberry
- First words
- My fifth day at the hotel I pretty near ran down John Stanford Barnhill in the corridor past the second floor library.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)...she straightens and her hands rise to the back of her head, the gathering there, and then her hair falls and beyond her the night sky blooms into great flashing white spirals of light, bombs bursting in air.
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Statistics
- Members
- 203
- Popularity
- 159,456
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.50)
- Languages
- English, French
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
- ASINs
- 3
