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A Reading by Robert Olen Butler
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author reads from his most recent novel, Perfume River
Monday, March 13, 2017
2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Campus Center, Weis Cinema
 [A Reading by Robert Olen Butler] On Monday, March 13, at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Robert Olen Butler reads from his new novel, Perfume River, the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Sponsored by the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, introduced by Bradford Morrow, and followed by a Q&A, this event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

Butler is the author of sixteen novels, including Mr. Spaceman and Hell, and six fiction collections, including Tabloid Dreams. His stories have appeared widely in such periodicals as Conjunctions, The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The Paris Review, VQR, and Granta; as well as in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, and elsewhere.
 
PRAISE FOR PERFUME RIVER
 
“What I so like about Perfume River is its plainly-put elegance. Enough time has passed since Viet Nam that its grave human lessons and heartbreaks can be—with a measure of genius—almost simply stated. Butler’s novel is a model for this heartbreaking simplicity and grace.” —Richard Ford

“Butler’s Faulknerian shuttling back and forth across the decades has less to do with literary pyrotechnics than with cutting to the chase. Perfume River hits its marks with a high-stakes intensity. Butler’s prose is fluid, and his handling of his many time-shifts as lucid as it is urgent. His descriptive gifts don’t extend just to his characters’ traits or their Florida and New Orleans settings, but to the history he’s addressing.”—New York Times Book Review

“A deeply meditative reflection on aging and love, as seen through the prism of one family quietly torn asunder by the lingering effects of the Vietnam War. This is thoughtful, introspective fiction of the highest caliber, but it carries a definite edge, thanks to an insistent backbeat that generates suspense with the subtlest of brushstrokes.” —Booklist (starred review)

Any supporter who donates $500 or more to Bard’s literary journal Conjunctions receives a BackPage Pass providing VIP access to any Spring/Fall 2017 or future event in the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series. Have lunch with a visiting author, attend a seminar on their work, and receive premium seating at their reading. Or you can give your BackPage Pass to a lover of literature on your gift list! To find out more, click here or contact Micaela Morrissette at [email protected] or (845) 758-7054.

Contact: Micaela Morrissette, [email protected], 845-758-7054

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Vol. 79
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Fall 2022
Edited by Bradford Morrow

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March 22, 2023
To survive sadly is still. 
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Allegedly an anchor. Allegations of a law. 
Oh splinters that split us, oh those who spit on our black gaberdine. 
The skin rolls the water off. That is what ash is, actually. 
Accumulation of spittoons and the water’s detritus. 

Hump day is a whale, freer than us even in capture, even in tallow. 
No one said: this isn’t a whale, even as they strung it up to cut its meat. 
No one said: this is something tbd. They said: mammal, leviathan, child of god, named by Adam. 

We got a new name. Something made up. We managed to live. In that hole name.
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He’s been coming around a lot but I’ve only recently started calling the dog Jesus because if Jesus were to return, this is how he would do it. In this shape, in this form, in these times. I’m sure of it. My best and only friend, Holy Amy, who thinks of herself as a kind of very powerful and sexually budding nun, disagrees. She says Jesus would return in the form of a handsome kisser, not some ugly mutt. Someone with a beautiful face, so we would know it was him. I say he’s not ugly. She says I am “vexed,” “cursed,” and that I am doomed to repeat the mistakes of those before me, though I’m not sure whom she’s talking about. All I know is it’s true: he’s not ugly. The dog suit he wears isn’t even a dog suit. 
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When the Reverend Houston was seventy he was retired from the ministry with a pension, paid by the national church organization, that was slightly in excess of the salary he had been receiving for nearly fifty years from his parish at New Babylon, Missouri. There were no strings attached to this pension. He could do with it and with himself, thereafter, practically anything that pleased his rational fancy. Naturally enough, he quit preaching. He had been preaching for nearly fifty years and he was getting just as tired of it as his congregation was. One Sunday morning during the summer of his seventieth year he shook hands with his successor, a vigorous young man who would attract plenty of spinsters to the Sunday-school faculty, walked calmly out of the church and never returned.