Severance / Intercourse

The human head remains in a state of consciousness for one and a half minutes after decapitation. In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at a rate of 160 words per minute. Inspired by this, Robert Olen Butler wrote Severance, sixty-two vignettes each exactly 240 words in length, that capture the flow of thoughts that go through a person’s mind after their head has been severed. Here are the imagined ultimate words of famous and invented figures – Medusa, Sir Walter Raleigh, Anne Boleyn, Jayne Mansfield, and a chicken, beheaded for Sunday dinner.

Following on from this, Butler addressed the question of: what goes through the mind of a person while having sex? Turning his daring imagination to the intimate, Butler lays bare the most flagrant, personal thoughts and feelings of fifty, often surprising, couples in Intercourse.

• First book in the new No Exit Press Classic Double series; ace doubles featuring two books for the same price as one
• Robert Olen Butler won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain to be reissued by No Exit Press in July 2016
• Author to our major new literary novel Perfume River around UK Dec 2016
• Robert Olen Butler’s The Hot Country received widespread acclaim in Sunday Times, BBC History Magazine, Guardian, BBC R4 Saturday Review and the author was interviewed on BBC R4 Front Row