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Tabloid Dreams
In his first collection since the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler dazzles anew with his mastery of the short-story form and his true empathy for the denizens of the less-well-explored corners of the human condition. Though his mirthful and appropriately absurd story titles - "Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis," "Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed," "Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband," and "JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction," among others - reflect Butler's genuine fondness for the outsized fancies of tabloid readers' and writers' imaginations, his ambitions are not so lighthearted or ephemeral. Once again he explores the enduring issues of cultural exile, loss, aspiration, and the search for the self. Employing a seamless mixture of high and low culture, of the surreal, the sordid, and the sad, Butler has created a frequently hilarious, always deeply moving, and profoundly American book.
203 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
30 people are currently reading
443 people want to read
About the author
Robert Olen Butler
86 books452 followers“I’ll never stop believing it: Robert Olen Butler is the best living American writer, period.”
– Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway.
In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, several other major annual anthologies, and numerous college literature textbooks from such publishers as Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking, Little Brown & Co., Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.Martin and most recently in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford.
His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, Greek, and most recently Chinese. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Over the past two decades he has lectured in universities, appeared at conferences, and met with writers groups in 17 countries as a literary envoy for the U. S. State Department.
He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Under the auspices of the FSU website, in the fall of 2001, he did something no other writer has ever done, before or since: he revealed his writing process in full, in real time, in a webcast that observed him in seventeen two-hour sessions write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. He also gave a running commentary on his artistic choices and spent a half-hour in each episode answering the emailed questions of his live viewers. The whole series, under the title “Inside Creative Writing” is a very popular on YouTube, with its first two-hour episode passing 125,000 in the spring of 2016.
For more than a decade he was hired to write feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. Typical of Hollywood, none of these movies ever made it to the screen.
Reflecting his early training as an actor, he has also recorded the audio books for four of his works—A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Hell, A Small Hotel and Perfume River. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree from the State University of New York system. He lives in Florida, with his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler.
– Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway.
In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, several other major annual anthologies, and numerous college literature textbooks from such publishers as Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking, Little Brown & Co., Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.Martin and most recently in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford.
His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, Greek, and most recently Chinese. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Over the past two decades he has lectured in universities, appeared at conferences, and met with writers groups in 17 countries as a literary envoy for the U. S. State Department.
He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Under the auspices of the FSU website, in the fall of 2001, he did something no other writer has ever done, before or since: he revealed his writing process in full, in real time, in a webcast that observed him in seventeen two-hour sessions write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. He also gave a running commentary on his artistic choices and spent a half-hour in each episode answering the emailed questions of his live viewers. The whole series, under the title “Inside Creative Writing” is a very popular on YouTube, with its first two-hour episode passing 125,000 in the spring of 2016.
For more than a decade he was hired to write feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. Typical of Hollywood, none of these movies ever made it to the screen.
Reflecting his early training as an actor, he has also recorded the audio books for four of his works—A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Hell, A Small Hotel and Perfume River. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree from the State University of New York system. He lives in Florida, with his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 71 reviews
March 3, 2013
I am a huge fan of the short story - a literary form which seems to have been largely demoted to appearing in magazines and journals (of various reputations), from which the crème de la crème is then selected and anthologized in volumes hardly anyone reads. An author who wants to publish a collection of his short fiction is often seen as someone pointing a loaded gun at his foot and attempting to pull the trigger; writers who deal exclusively in short fiction seem to be in incredibly short supply. The truth is that short story collections are nowhere near as marketable as novels - and while they can be critical darlings, commerical success is almost always a domain of the novel - though there are notable exceptions, such as Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain which got adapted into the Oscar-winning film.
I discovered Robert Olen Butler by accident, when I found out about his collection of stories titled A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - which I read and enjoyed enormously and gave full five stars. These stories, exploring the lives of Vietnamese refugees in Louisiana, gave voice to an important minority group which did not yet have its own herald - and were a showcase of riveting storytelling, with a convincing narrative tone and deep respect for the people they described. These stories, with their sense of nostalgia and longing, were full of humanity - and rightfully won the Pulitzer Prize.
In his second collection Butler takes a drastically different approach - the stories in Tabloid Dreams are inspired by the outlandish headlines one will occasionally glimpse in the yellow press. These tabloids are often stacked at the checkout lines in supermarkets, where millions of shoppers see these headlines all but screaming at them. Here are some real examples: "Abraham Lincoln was a woman!" "Hilary Clinton adopts alien baby", "Alien Bible found! (they worship Oprah!)", "Headless body in a topless bar", "Satan Captured by GIs in Iraq".
The main problem with such articles (apart from the fact that they're a load of bull) is the fact that the punchline is revealed immediately, before the prospective buyer even reaches for the paper: the writers of these articles create the punchline in advance, and then mold the actual story to suit the outcome. The tabloid headline has to schock with schlock; the headline is the memorable part, while the actual article is as forgettable as the latest hit from the current pop star. Butler honors the tabloid approach by creating wild and outlandish premises from the - and does them justice. Aliens and unfaithful spouses, violent juveniles and approaching asteroids, Elvis and other famous dead figures - all common tabloid material, and all serve as the basis for these bizarre, surreal stories.
In opposition to the tabloid - where the focus always lies on the controversy - Butler focuses his stories on their protagonists. By employing the first person narration - as he did in A Good Scent - he gives each of them an unique voice, and a stage to let them present their troubles: in Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed a ghost of a mannered English servant is trapped in a waterbed and remembers the woman he fell in love that night, and saved by putting her on a lifeboat; his memories are interrupted by a couple which attempts to use the bed for another kind of love. In Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover Edna Bradshaw falls in love with Desi, a man who claims to be from space, and is forced to make a choice: either stay with her dysfunctional family in the South or elope - into space! This is a surprisingly poignant story. The whole collection - as outlandish as it sounds - is perpetuated by a sense of sadness, and the people in it not happy. Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot is the story of a reincarnated husband, who is unable to communicate with his wife - to his distress, as she does not recognize him in a body of a parrot. Think of it as The Metamorphosis of the late 20th century.
"Every Man She Kisses Dies" is as preposterous as it is sad - the woman of the story is unable to form any relationship with anyone, as sooner or later she will kiss and make the other person die. She is angry and frustrated, as she does not understand why this is so, and lonely, and afraid. To create such a character in such a small frame of time and space is mastery, and Butler proves his talent in spades.
But there is more still, more stories of detached characters, who are absurd, sad, moving and memorable. In Nine-Year-Old Boy Is World's Youngest Hit Man a nine year old is a professional assasin, who works with surprisingly good results (after all, who would suspect a nine year old of being a murderer?). Each time he takes on a new job he imagines that it is his father that he is killing. He is cold, ruthless, and effective - yet cares for his mother, and deep down longs to be with his father as well. The story is based on a real headline from Weekly World News, which described the story of Luca Contalia, an Italian child "who has killed at least 11 men and earned millions of dollars while frustrating police all over the world - at the tender age of 9!". The article discloses that authorities have linked young Luca to five murders in Italy, three in France, and one in Switzerland. When asked for an opinion on Luca, a mob insider "confided that Luca is highly regarded among gangsters. "This kid, he is the best" - the gangster said".
JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction is indebted to the endless tabloid conspiracies, as it is about the still-living president who is hiding from the public eye, but chooses to secretly attend the auction of his late wife's possessions. He remembers her in the materialistic way of the tabloids - through necklaces she wore, handbags, decorations, pottery...he gazes at these things until he spots her in the crowd - several times.
The collection ends where it begins - again with the Titanic, in Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle, a surreal entry narrated by the lost love of the waterbed ghost. It is perhaps the only entry which is hopeful, even positive, despite being very dark: the woman is depressed and keeps remembering that fateful night, going back to the moment of the ship's sinking. She remembers her life - how she has devoted herself to causes of progress, and feels that shedoes ot hav abything left to fight for. Her grief is consoled only by the memories of the man who has saved her life all these years ago. It is really a beautiful story, and a powerful closure to the volume.
This is a vastly diffferent collection than A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and it is my pleasure to say that it has the same quality that its predecessor. If faced with a choice I think I would say that A Good Scent is a stronger collection, but Tabloid Dreams comes at a close second - these stories could so easily have turned into hopeless comedies, or mean-spirited parodies of contemporary America, which is exactly what the tabloids are. Despite their absurdity and surreality, I found these stories to be emotionally engaging and quite touching - full of creative imagination, with clear empathy and consideration for their subjects. In their tabloid realities they come alive with their dreams, hopes and desires, walking on the thin rope which separates the human from the absurd, and never slipping. Tabloid Dreams was a very rewarding reading experience, and like his previous collection is a work to which I will happily return to in the future.
I discovered Robert Olen Butler by accident, when I found out about his collection of stories titled A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - which I read and enjoyed enormously and gave full five stars. These stories, exploring the lives of Vietnamese refugees in Louisiana, gave voice to an important minority group which did not yet have its own herald - and were a showcase of riveting storytelling, with a convincing narrative tone and deep respect for the people they described. These stories, with their sense of nostalgia and longing, were full of humanity - and rightfully won the Pulitzer Prize.
In his second collection Butler takes a drastically different approach - the stories in Tabloid Dreams are inspired by the outlandish headlines one will occasionally glimpse in the yellow press. These tabloids are often stacked at the checkout lines in supermarkets, where millions of shoppers see these headlines all but screaming at them. Here are some real examples: "Abraham Lincoln was a woman!" "Hilary Clinton adopts alien baby", "Alien Bible found! (they worship Oprah!)", "Headless body in a topless bar", "Satan Captured by GIs in Iraq".
The main problem with such articles (apart from the fact that they're a load of bull) is the fact that the punchline is revealed immediately, before the prospective buyer even reaches for the paper: the writers of these articles create the punchline in advance, and then mold the actual story to suit the outcome. The tabloid headline has to schock with schlock; the headline is the memorable part, while the actual article is as forgettable as the latest hit from the current pop star. Butler honors the tabloid approach by creating wild and outlandish premises from the - and does them justice. Aliens and unfaithful spouses, violent juveniles and approaching asteroids, Elvis and other famous dead figures - all common tabloid material, and all serve as the basis for these bizarre, surreal stories.
In opposition to the tabloid - where the focus always lies on the controversy - Butler focuses his stories on their protagonists. By employing the first person narration - as he did in A Good Scent - he gives each of them an unique voice, and a stage to let them present their troubles: in Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed a ghost of a mannered English servant is trapped in a waterbed and remembers the woman he fell in love that night, and saved by putting her on a lifeboat; his memories are interrupted by a couple which attempts to use the bed for another kind of love. In Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover Edna Bradshaw falls in love with Desi, a man who claims to be from space, and is forced to make a choice: either stay with her dysfunctional family in the South or elope - into space! This is a surprisingly poignant story. The whole collection - as outlandish as it sounds - is perpetuated by a sense of sadness, and the people in it not happy. Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot is the story of a reincarnated husband, who is unable to communicate with his wife - to his distress, as she does not recognize him in a body of a parrot. Think of it as The Metamorphosis of the late 20th century.
"Every Man She Kisses Dies" is as preposterous as it is sad - the woman of the story is unable to form any relationship with anyone, as sooner or later she will kiss and make the other person die. She is angry and frustrated, as she does not understand why this is so, and lonely, and afraid. To create such a character in such a small frame of time and space is mastery, and Butler proves his talent in spades.
But there is more still, more stories of detached characters, who are absurd, sad, moving and memorable. In Nine-Year-Old Boy Is World's Youngest Hit Man a nine year old is a professional assasin, who works with surprisingly good results (after all, who would suspect a nine year old of being a murderer?). Each time he takes on a new job he imagines that it is his father that he is killing. He is cold, ruthless, and effective - yet cares for his mother, and deep down longs to be with his father as well. The story is based on a real headline from Weekly World News, which described the story of Luca Contalia, an Italian child "who has killed at least 11 men and earned millions of dollars while frustrating police all over the world - at the tender age of 9!". The article discloses that authorities have linked young Luca to five murders in Italy, three in France, and one in Switzerland. When asked for an opinion on Luca, a mob insider "confided that Luca is highly regarded among gangsters. "This kid, he is the best" - the gangster said".
JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction is indebted to the endless tabloid conspiracies, as it is about the still-living president who is hiding from the public eye, but chooses to secretly attend the auction of his late wife's possessions. He remembers her in the materialistic way of the tabloids - through necklaces she wore, handbags, decorations, pottery...he gazes at these things until he spots her in the crowd - several times.
The collection ends where it begins - again with the Titanic, in Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle, a surreal entry narrated by the lost love of the waterbed ghost. It is perhaps the only entry which is hopeful, even positive, despite being very dark: the woman is depressed and keeps remembering that fateful night, going back to the moment of the ship's sinking. She remembers her life - how she has devoted herself to causes of progress, and feels that shedoes ot hav abything left to fight for. Her grief is consoled only by the memories of the man who has saved her life all these years ago. It is really a beautiful story, and a powerful closure to the volume.
This is a vastly diffferent collection than A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and it is my pleasure to say that it has the same quality that its predecessor. If faced with a choice I think I would say that A Good Scent is a stronger collection, but Tabloid Dreams comes at a close second - these stories could so easily have turned into hopeless comedies, or mean-spirited parodies of contemporary America, which is exactly what the tabloids are. Despite their absurdity and surreality, I found these stories to be emotionally engaging and quite touching - full of creative imagination, with clear empathy and consideration for their subjects. In their tabloid realities they come alive with their dreams, hopes and desires, walking on the thin rope which separates the human from the absurd, and never slipping. Tabloid Dreams was a very rewarding reading experience, and like his previous collection is a work to which I will happily return to in the future.
January 1, 2009
The worst trash in print, the titles glimpsed on the pseudo-newspapers in the supermarket checkout lane, provided Robert Olen Butler with the dreams that are this story-sequence, a assortment of beautiful losers. A rare imagination's at work here, spinning a fresh crazy quilt from the weirdness in the big-font bold type, the stuff of JFK & Jackie O & Elvis, of reincarnation & impossibly gifted children. Not surprisingly, the stories that result are a dozen smushed cookies, tragedies w/ a sweet tooth, using screwball means to reveal heartache & defeat. The lone exception would be the closer, a case of transcendence, genuine though nutty, w/ a heroine who survives first the wreck of the Titanic & then the passage of the entire subsequent century. I'd say she closes the circle, that girl; she ushers all these freaks & anomalies back into the ocean of story. Butler finds fresh currents & leewards across that ocean, in TABLOID DREAMS, & while at the level of sentence he doesn't shake me as deeply as, say, a Barthelme, his foursquare American rhythms nonetheless prove impressively flexible, & I'm down in a slalam at his sense of timing, his ability to turn a story around a central phrase. This author won big (the Pulitzer, especially) for his previous collection, A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN. That book is indeed masterful, a great immigrant story-sequence, about the Vietnamese after 1975. But the fact that GOOD SCENT was told by someone American-born, rockribbed Midwestern, anticipates the freedom of idea & empathy found in these DREAMS, a fantasy-catalogue w/ the power to bruise even as it makes us chuckle. This one wears the medal on my library shelf, vivid proof that you needn't go farther than the corner store to start chasing some strange.
November 15, 2019
Robert Olen Butler's story collection Tabloid Dreams is one of the most creative, imaginative books I've read. Butler gives the title of each story in the form of a tabloid headline--"Every Man She Kisses Dies," "Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband." All the stories are quirky and outrageous, but they all display the wonderful mix of humor and pathos which are earmarks of Butler's fiction.
My favorite story in the collection is "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot," in which the parrot/husband finds himself purchased by his widow. The bizarre coincidence, at first joyous, turns sour as he has to watch, from his large cage in the living room, his wife's train of lovers. Here's the opening paragraph:
"I never can quite say as much as I know. I look at other parrots and I wonder if it's the same for them, if somebody is trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way. For instance, 'Hello,' i say, and I'm sitting on a perch in a pet store in Houston and what I'm really thinking is Holy Shit. It's you. And what's happened is I'm looking at my wife."
The structure of the book includes a lovely touch. The first story, "Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed," is book-ended by the final story, "Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle." The two stories have as their frame the same experience on board the Titanic, the experience of a British man and an American woman who meet briefly. The first story is narrated by the man, the last is narrated by the woman.
I recommend the book. It's refreshing, funny, touching.
My favorite story in the collection is "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot," in which the parrot/husband finds himself purchased by his widow. The bizarre coincidence, at first joyous, turns sour as he has to watch, from his large cage in the living room, his wife's train of lovers. Here's the opening paragraph:
"I never can quite say as much as I know. I look at other parrots and I wonder if it's the same for them, if somebody is trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way. For instance, 'Hello,' i say, and I'm sitting on a perch in a pet store in Houston and what I'm really thinking is Holy Shit. It's you. And what's happened is I'm looking at my wife."
The structure of the book includes a lovely touch. The first story, "Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed," is book-ended by the final story, "Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle." The two stories have as their frame the same experience on board the Titanic, the experience of a British man and an American woman who meet briefly. The first story is narrated by the man, the last is narrated by the woman.
I recommend the book. It's refreshing, funny, touching.
May 7, 2015
Conceptually compelling, but too much of a literal retelling of those tabloid headlines. I was hoping for a more subtle, ironic treatment of those sensationalist stories. I'm sure this was an experimental literary achievement in its time, especially from Butler.
January 2, 2013
the reviews were good, but i wasn't impressed. conceptually imaginative, yes... but many stories dragged, lost my interest, and or failed when clearly trying to make me laugh or elicit a that's-really-clever response.
October 15, 2021
Robert Olen Butler isn’t an obscure writer (he’s won a Pulitzer after all), but I discovered him late. Now he’s on my “definitely read” list.
This is a collection of short stories (twelve altogether) around the theme of tabloid headlines. Each story is titled like a tabloid story (e.g., "Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis”) and the title is placed in quotation marks, just to make sure we get the idea.
The thing is that, if the tabloid stories were true, they wouldn’t in reality be so tabloidish. These would be real people, in very strange circumstances, experiencing very strange events, as real human beings would experience them.
The jealous husband who returns to life as a parrot, only to be adopted by his ex-wife — he watches from his (admittedly comfortable) cage as his ex-wife carries on with the same rangy love life she pursued while he was alive and they were married.
It’s not about the sensationalism — it’s about the humanity that would lie behind the tabloid story.
There is dark humor in the stories, and always the recipe of distance and empathy that makes each one surreal on the factual level and real on the emotional level. The result is a light reading experience that you can take as deep as you’d like in your own reflections.
The first and last stories are bookends (sorry for the pun — it just happened that way). They provide a kind of artifice that’s in keeping with the tone of the book — a surreal literary enclosure.
They provide complementary perspectives on the disaster of the Titanic, one from a man who dies after doing his best, bound to his time and place, to offer some comfort and help to a single woman, seeing her to the lifeboats. He is reborn fittingly in water (hence the title, “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed”).
And the other of course is the woman, who offers her experience of the man’s somewhat awkward, time-bound comfort and aid-giving. She is propelled forward into a future, a woman feeling unbound now from that specific time and place (“Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle”).
I looked for something by Butler after reading his Hell and having it come back to mind over the several years since I read it. Hoping for the same with this one, and with more by him.
This is a collection of short stories (twelve altogether) around the theme of tabloid headlines. Each story is titled like a tabloid story (e.g., "Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis”) and the title is placed in quotation marks, just to make sure we get the idea.
The thing is that, if the tabloid stories were true, they wouldn’t in reality be so tabloidish. These would be real people, in very strange circumstances, experiencing very strange events, as real human beings would experience them.
The jealous husband who returns to life as a parrot, only to be adopted by his ex-wife — he watches from his (admittedly comfortable) cage as his ex-wife carries on with the same rangy love life she pursued while he was alive and they were married.
It’s not about the sensationalism — it’s about the humanity that would lie behind the tabloid story.
There is dark humor in the stories, and always the recipe of distance and empathy that makes each one surreal on the factual level and real on the emotional level. The result is a light reading experience that you can take as deep as you’d like in your own reflections.
The first and last stories are bookends (sorry for the pun — it just happened that way). They provide a kind of artifice that’s in keeping with the tone of the book — a surreal literary enclosure.
They provide complementary perspectives on the disaster of the Titanic, one from a man who dies after doing his best, bound to his time and place, to offer some comfort and help to a single woman, seeing her to the lifeboats. He is reborn fittingly in water (hence the title, “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed”).
And the other of course is the woman, who offers her experience of the man’s somewhat awkward, time-bound comfort and aid-giving. She is propelled forward into a future, a woman feeling unbound now from that specific time and place (“Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle”).
I looked for something by Butler after reading his Hell and having it come back to mind over the several years since I read it. Hoping for the same with this one, and with more by him.
December 8, 2008
This man's short stories continue to amaze and astound me.
These stories are each entitled with lurid tabloid headlines such as "Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed," "Woman Loses Cookie Bake-Off, Sets Self on Fire," and "Every Man She Kisses Dies," but those titles are merely jumping-off points for surprisingly inventive and emotionally rewarding writing.
I was sorry to reach the end of these stories... Butler's a short-story hero.
These stories are each entitled with lurid tabloid headlines such as "Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed," "Woman Loses Cookie Bake-Off, Sets Self on Fire," and "Every Man She Kisses Dies," but those titles are merely jumping-off points for surprisingly inventive and emotionally rewarding writing.
I was sorry to reach the end of these stories... Butler's a short-story hero.
March 17, 2008
One of the best short story collections I've ever read! Butler uses tabloid headlines to craft truly heart-wrenching stories--from a boy born with Elvis tattooed on his chest, to a dead ex-husband who comes back as his ex-wife's parrot (one of my faves in the collection).
January 31, 2018
I was in desperate need of a palate cleanser after back-to-back, unsavory, 2-star reads. This served its purpose with some stories approaching the level of an amuse-bouche.
January 25, 2019
I loved how Butler was able to write from so many perspectives in this collection and master all of them. His characters were men, women, children (and one parrot), from high culture and low, from past and present, and they all felt so genuine. Each story had something to say about loss, and most of them were sadder than I was expecting. Since every title was ripped straight from a tabloid, I was expecting this to be goofy. And even the more humorous ones (I loved “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” in college, and “Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover” was just hilarious) still had a familiar ache to them. Butler is an exceptionally talented writer. To take prompts from one of the basest forms of literature we have and turn it into art like this is truly impressive.
I liked when these stories would interact with each other. The Doomsday meteor one mentions several of the other stories, and bookending the collection are two different perspectives of the same events during the sinking of the Titanic. It was really elegant and tied much of the collection together.
But, like any collection, I liked some stories more than others, so once again I am averaging it out and giving it 3 stars. This was worth the read, though, as Butler writes beautifully, even when I’m not really digging the story, and he has a really good grip on the short story form.
I liked when these stories would interact with each other. The Doomsday meteor one mentions several of the other stories, and bookending the collection are two different perspectives of the same events during the sinking of the Titanic. It was really elegant and tied much of the collection together.
But, like any collection, I liked some stories more than others, so once again I am averaging it out and giving it 3 stars. This was worth the read, though, as Butler writes beautifully, even when I’m not really digging the story, and he has a really good grip on the short story form.
October 22, 2020
As with most collections of short stories, the contents actually vary from 5-star to *meh* ... I also recognize that the stars could vary from one reader to another -- one person's *meh* is another's solid gold ...
This collection, with its clever starting point of stories ripped from the headlines of America's finest supermarket checkout tabloids, contains one of my very favorite short stories, "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot." Like a masterclass in the creative use of Point of View, it's a must for any writer who wants tips on how POV can help shape your character, and your narrative. (I used this story repeatedly in my Creative Writing class ...) Watching as the consciousness of the Jealous Husband drifts away from the human he once was (and, indeed, the jealous human he once was ...) and become more and more birdlike, is just brilliant -- hilarious and sad, and very vivid. I hadn't read it for almost 10 years, so I was delighted to discover that it lived up to my very fond recollections of it.
My other two favorites were the opening and closing stories which -- no spoiler, I think -- are linked. (The "Titanic Victim ..." and "Titanic Survivors ..." in the titles might be a bit of a giveaway ...) I thought Butler gave in to the temptation to be a bit too, hmmm ... lyrical, which he resisted in "Jealous Husband," but even so, separately, they are lovely stories, and together they bring everything to a satisfying conclusion. Also found "JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction" very touching.
I wasn't blown away by any of the other stories, and (sadly) the conceit of the tabloid headlines began to feel forced. Again, thinking about the use of POV, Butler interpreted his grand design to mean that all of the stories are 1st person, and not all of the characters seem as engaging and sympathetic as the two from the Titanic stories, and the Jealous Husband. Perhaps it would have been better if he'd allowed himself some leeway in his interpretation of the headlines.
This collection, with its clever starting point of stories ripped from the headlines of America's finest supermarket checkout tabloids, contains one of my very favorite short stories, "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot." Like a masterclass in the creative use of Point of View, it's a must for any writer who wants tips on how POV can help shape your character, and your narrative. (I used this story repeatedly in my Creative Writing class ...) Watching as the consciousness of the Jealous Husband drifts away from the human he once was (and, indeed, the jealous human he once was ...) and become more and more birdlike, is just brilliant -- hilarious and sad, and very vivid. I hadn't read it for almost 10 years, so I was delighted to discover that it lived up to my very fond recollections of it.
My other two favorites were the opening and closing stories which -- no spoiler, I think -- are linked. (The "Titanic Victim ..." and "Titanic Survivors ..." in the titles might be a bit of a giveaway ...) I thought Butler gave in to the temptation to be a bit too, hmmm ... lyrical, which he resisted in "Jealous Husband," but even so, separately, they are lovely stories, and together they bring everything to a satisfying conclusion. Also found "JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction" very touching.
I wasn't blown away by any of the other stories, and (sadly) the conceit of the tabloid headlines began to feel forced. Again, thinking about the use of POV, Butler interpreted his grand design to mean that all of the stories are 1st person, and not all of the characters seem as engaging and sympathetic as the two from the Titanic stories, and the Jealous Husband. Perhaps it would have been better if he'd allowed himself some leeway in his interpretation of the headlines.
February 19, 2009
A collection of short stories all based on outrageous tabloid headlines with titles such as: Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot, Woman Loses Cookie Bake Off and Sets Self on Fire, and Baby Born With Tattoo of Elvis.
Robert Olen Butler is a true master of channeling compelling character voices. While the backdrop of each story may be wacky, the characters are nothing short of inspired. Make no mistake, while the tabloid premise adds a layer of humor and lightheartedness, the true focus of these stories is always on the people and the things they desire most in their heart of hearts.
Robert Olen Butler creates characters with original voices and profound longings. Reading this collection, as well as the author's subsequent work, has helped me to learn to convey a sense of longing in my own characters. It's just like the words of the late Kurt Vonnegut, "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water."
Butler is probably my absolute favorite living writer, and this collection of stories is my favorite example of his work.
Robert Olen Butler is a true master of channeling compelling character voices. While the backdrop of each story may be wacky, the characters are nothing short of inspired. Make no mistake, while the tabloid premise adds a layer of humor and lightheartedness, the true focus of these stories is always on the people and the things they desire most in their heart of hearts.
Robert Olen Butler creates characters with original voices and profound longings. Reading this collection, as well as the author's subsequent work, has helped me to learn to convey a sense of longing in my own characters. It's just like the words of the late Kurt Vonnegut, "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water."
Butler is probably my absolute favorite living writer, and this collection of stories is my favorite example of his work.
February 22, 2014
This book wasn't as fabulous as I'd hoped it would be. The stories were a bit too on-the-nose, I suppose. For many of them, you honestly could have just read the title and understood exactly what was coming, which was a little disappointing.
There were, however, some stand outs (particularly "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot") and none of the stories were bad, per se, but I did find myself flipping forward a few times to see how many pages I had left (this was another school read), and that's rarely a good sign.
There were, however, some stand outs (particularly "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot") and none of the stories were bad, per se, but I did find myself flipping forward a few times to see how many pages I had left (this was another school read), and that's rarely a good sign.
October 1, 2025
I found this in a weird way--I was reminiscing about the Weekly World News and looked into their Wikipedia and saw this book which uses similar tabloid headlines as short story prompts. Great premise for a freako like me! I thought majority of these stories had great starts, some of the stories even managed to close well--namely "Every Man She Kisses Dies." However, I felt a lot of these stories did not stick the landing, and I was mostly left feeling unsatisfied. Still, one of the most creative ideas for a short story collection, so I do think it's worth a read.
December 28, 2007
My favorite book of short fiction.
August 31, 2008
One of the most talented, darkest, and complex storytellers I've ever read.
July 20, 2018
An interesting idea pulled off with consummate skill, every short story in this book is titled after a tabloid headline that the author dreamed up. The stories then follow the character(s) in the headline with the expected humor but also a lot of poignancy and insight. This is one of my favorite quotations, from a story titled Titanic survivors found in Bermuda Triangle:
"To be honest, I grew weary of it all suddenly, and I went away. I cashed in my passage back to America and I went off to Italy for a little while, to Venice. I rented a room in a palazzo on the Rio San Luca and I found a small campo nearby with a fountain and a statue of the Virgin Mary without her child in hand, just her, and I sat in the sun, dressed from throat to ankle in a shirtwaist suit and I read and I spoke to no one. At night I would lie on the bed and the window would be open and I would read some more, by candlelight, still in my clothes, and one night there was a full moon and I went out and the tide was high and I think there had been storms at sea and I wandered the dark paths toward the Piazza San Marco and I came through the gallery and suddenly before me was the piazza and it was covered with water from the lagoon. Thinly, but there was not a single stone left uncovered. I drew back. The moon was shimmering out there in the water, and the stars, and I was afraid. And I was suddenly conscious of my solitariness there in that place, in that city, in that country, in the world. I had friends but we only had ideas between us and though the ideas were strong and righteous, I had not yet been naked in Venice except curled tight in a stone room with a tub of water and a sponge, wiping the scent of my body away, and quickly, never looking at myself, and then rushing back into my clothes. For all my ideas I was not comfortable in this woman's body."
"To be honest, I grew weary of it all suddenly, and I went away. I cashed in my passage back to America and I went off to Italy for a little while, to Venice. I rented a room in a palazzo on the Rio San Luca and I found a small campo nearby with a fountain and a statue of the Virgin Mary without her child in hand, just her, and I sat in the sun, dressed from throat to ankle in a shirtwaist suit and I read and I spoke to no one. At night I would lie on the bed and the window would be open and I would read some more, by candlelight, still in my clothes, and one night there was a full moon and I went out and the tide was high and I think there had been storms at sea and I wandered the dark paths toward the Piazza San Marco and I came through the gallery and suddenly before me was the piazza and it was covered with water from the lagoon. Thinly, but there was not a single stone left uncovered. I drew back. The moon was shimmering out there in the water, and the stars, and I was afraid. And I was suddenly conscious of my solitariness there in that place, in that city, in that country, in the world. I had friends but we only had ideas between us and though the ideas were strong and righteous, I had not yet been naked in Venice except curled tight in a stone room with a tub of water and a sponge, wiping the scent of my body away, and quickly, never looking at myself, and then rushing back into my clothes. For all my ideas I was not comfortable in this woman's body."
July 8, 2025
Butler’s Tabloid Dreams is one of my favorite short story collections that I have ever read. It comes with a quirky premise - the gimmick is, Butler took a series of Weekly World News-like headlines and then used the as the basis for each of the short stories in the book. They are often funny, wild, and captivating, but where the collection shines is where you forget about the gimmick, and Butler’s prose and momentum create truly beautiful, sentimental moments. I wish I had a favorite, but reall,y I enjoyed my entire time with this book and would pick it up again. While I wish the WWN was still around (of course there are many online archives of them quite easy to find) and print is slowly disappearing from supermarket and pharmacy shelves anyway, this is a great way to find a touching approach to something a lot of us loved and it is a beautiful tribute as much as it is wonderfully written and beautifully entertaining. While we are stuck with PDFs of the WWN and George Noory ruined Art Bell's life work, this is a great dip into a love letter to the bizarre midnight mind.
November 24, 2019
I love the slipstream nature of Butler’s stories in this collection but there are occasional slips throughout this volume that prevent me from giving Tabloid Dreams five stars. Sometimes they are more forgivable, like in the opening story when Butler occasionally uses a loose economy of words, flattening what could otherwise be an immersive, rich scene. Some readers might accuse Butler of misappropriation based upon the number of first person female protagonists in these stories, but what bothers me more is how he handles race in these narratives. No matter how much I love the whimsy of the tabloid headed stories and the overall weirdness of stories involving an alien in a cowboy hat starting a relationship with a woman outside a Walmart or a woman with a glass eye that she can use to spy on her husband while he is having an affair, I don’t get a sense while reading Tabloid Dreams that Butler thought about how his characters describe racial “others” in much detail.
September 4, 2018
It is very difficult to explain what makes these stories work. Wait. No, it isn’t actually. It is writing at its best—that’s what makes it work. There is not a bad story in this collection. Butler’s characters range from nine year old to adult, from male to female, from educated to not, and every single voice rings true. Not only that, he makes you feel for each character and believe each character. No matter how ridiculous the situation (Tabloid headlines afterall) you care. You really care.
The only criticism I have is that the end came too quickly—I wanted more. Many, many more.
The only criticism I have is that the end came too quickly—I wanted more. Many, many more.
August 18, 2019
Recueil de nouvelles, inspirées de titres façon "magazines d'enquête" (hum hum). On pourrait espérer que ce soit drôle, comme certaines couvertures de ces magazines, ou comme les faux (et hilarants) articles de "infos du monde", mais... en fait non, pas vraiment. Derrière chaque titre farfelu se trouve une histoire pleine de jalousie, de haine, de regrets.
Même pas drôle, quoi.
Même pas drôle, quoi.
November 19, 2020
I like how each short story has its own voice: it makes you sympathize with the characters. While there were characters I cared for more than the others it's difficult to say what my favorite short story was.
I wasn't expecting everything to come full circle with the first and last stories. That was a bittersweet move by the author.
I wasn't expecting everything to come full circle with the first and last stories. That was a bittersweet move by the author.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 8, 2025
It’s always hard to rate short story collections because rarely does one manage to compel me all the way through. My favorite story here is the first one, “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed,” which was immersive and beautifully written, an easy 5 star—but the rest of the stories in the collection gradually lost me.
November 14, 2021
Interesting/original sometimes funny short story collection (unlike this review which is none of those things).
February 5, 2024
Decent writing but the stories were weird and unkind.
November 25, 2024
I spy, with my magic eye, a few gems here and there. I certainly wish I had a spaceman lover, or a ghost in my waterbed.
March 11, 2025
I'm sad I don't remember this collection well but the way he uses trash writing and tabloid headlines to craft fantastic, weird, fun stories is amazing
February 28, 2017
Excellent short stories, turning made-up tabloid headlines ("Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot") into terribly funny and often moving portraits of subjugated internal strife. Great idea, perfectly executed. Very entertaining and moving.
February 4, 2009
These were fun. I appreciate the cleverness of the premise and that the collection is bookended by stories that, in part, retell the same moment from different perspectives. Also, there are a couple small places in the stories where they reference one from earlier in the collection. These are throwaway lines, but they fit the whimsical/absurd aspects of these stories well and help them feel like a cohesive whole. It's a pretty tidy package.
A few of the stories ("Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed" and "Woman Loses Cookie Bake-Off, Sets Self On Fire" come to mind) never quite rose above the premise to work for me as compelling stories outside of the tabloid aspect. With the sensational headline titles, I think these stories have to walk a fine line to get the reader to take them seriously. And this reader wants to be able to take them seriously. To do that, I need pretty rock-solid characters with desires and relationships with each other that are clear and familiar to cling to in these slightly skewed realities. Most of the stories in this collection come through for me in this respect. Just a couple didn't quite hit that nail on the head.
On the flip side of this coin, several of these stories really blew me out of the water. "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot," "Nine-Year-Old Boy Is World's Youngest Hit Man," and "JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction" are probably my top three here. These struck me as funny and touching and sweet and a little heartbreaking despite their inherent absurdities. It's pretty impressive to me that Butler is able to get this range out of the most morally ambiguous nine-year-old narrater I've ever met and a bird. Very well done.
A few of the stories ("Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed" and "Woman Loses Cookie Bake-Off, Sets Self On Fire" come to mind) never quite rose above the premise to work for me as compelling stories outside of the tabloid aspect. With the sensational headline titles, I think these stories have to walk a fine line to get the reader to take them seriously. And this reader wants to be able to take them seriously. To do that, I need pretty rock-solid characters with desires and relationships with each other that are clear and familiar to cling to in these slightly skewed realities. Most of the stories in this collection come through for me in this respect. Just a couple didn't quite hit that nail on the head.
On the flip side of this coin, several of these stories really blew me out of the water. "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot," "Nine-Year-Old Boy Is World's Youngest Hit Man," and "JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction" are probably my top three here. These struck me as funny and touching and sweet and a little heartbreaking despite their inherent absurdities. It's pretty impressive to me that Butler is able to get this range out of the most morally ambiguous nine-year-old narrater I've ever met and a bird. Very well done.
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