A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Robert Olen Butler

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Robert Olen Butler’s lyrical and poignant collection of stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. A contemporary classic by one of America’s most important living writers, this edition of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain includes two subsequently published stories that brilliantly complete the collection’s narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam.

Category: Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary

Paperback

RRP: £8.99

ISBN: 9781843447603

Published: July 27, 2016

Extent: 320 pages

Ebook

RRP: £4.99

ISBN: 9781843447610

Published: September 24, 2015

Reviews

‘Butler has not entered the significant and ever-growing canon of Vietnam-related fiction (he has long been a member) he has changed its composition forever’

Guardian

‘A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is remarkable … for how beautifully it achieves its daring project of making the Vietnamese real’

George Packer , The New York Times Book Review

‘Butler writes essentially, and in a bewitching translation of voice and sympathy, what it means to lose a country, to remember it, and to have the memory begin to grow old. He writes as if it were his loss, too’

Richard Eder , Los Angeles Times Book Review

‘The number of novels and short-story collections about the Vietnam War is now approaching five hundred. Were I to recommend a single volume that poignantly shows the magnitude and the humanity of the tragedy, it would be this one … Each story is written with compassion, extraordinary insight, and frequent humor’

John Clark Pratt , The Detroit News

‘This is one of the best, most finely tuned pieces of prose fiction that I have read in a long time’

Vince Passaro , New York Newsday

Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and sixteen other novels including Hell, A Small Hotel, Perfume River, and the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series. He is also the author of six short story collections and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and received the 2013 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

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