Robert Olen Butler Books in Order

As Saigon falls, American deserter Clifford Wilkes must decide whether he and his Vietnamese partner, Lanh, can escape together. Their flight to America brings a new kind of struggle, as love collides with displacement, memory, and belonging.

Former prisoner of war Wilson Hand travels to Alaska to investigate corporate espionage for an oil company. The wilderness offers escape, but a suspicious affair and memories of Vietnam force him to confront dangers both present and deeply buried.

Near the end of World War II, an archaeologist races to excavate a New Mexico burial site before an atomic test destroys it. Military pressure, scientific ambition, and the threat of violence turn his work into a moral reckoning.

Army intelligence captain David Fleming faces a court-martial after helping a Viet Cong prisoner escape. As Saigon nears collapse, he returns to Vietnam on a desperate search for the woman he loved and the son he believes he left behind.

During the Depression, a grieving steelworker in Wabash, Illinois, is caught between a brutal mill and an increasingly bitter labor struggle. Personal loss and economic desperation push him toward choices that could destroy what remains of his family.

A half-Vietnamese teenager recounts his life amid the hard edges of New York’s Port Authority and Forty-second Street. Trying to survive a world of hustlers, loneliness, and desire, he searches for a place where he might belong.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection follows Vietnamese and Vietnamese American characters living with the aftermath of war. Set largely in Louisiana and shaped by folklore, memory, and family, the stories make exile feel intimate and immediate.

Public relations man Ira Holloway is flooded by memories of the women he has known, each awakened by a sensation or chance encounter. Beneath his sensual recollections lies a failing marriage and a painful question about intimacy, responsibility, and love.

Butler turns lurid tabloid-style headlines into twelve inventive stories about outsiders, longing, and loss. A woman meets an alien, a boy becomes a killer, and strange premises open into tales that are comic, sad, and surprisingly human.

A Vietnamese woman orphaned during Saigon’s fall meets an American Vietnam veteran returning in search of peace. Their growing love crosses old wounds and cultural divides, but the past makes their relationship increasingly perilous.

On the eve of the millennium, twelve casino-bound travelers are beamed aboard an alien spaceship. Their host, Desi, has spent decades studying humans and now needs their help with a mission that tests his affection for Earth.

Amy Dickerson is a gifted auctioneer who understands the desires behind every bid. When a mysterious man fixates on her, her polished life carries her from New York to Houston and Paris, where love starts to resemble possession.

Listening For God, Vol. 4 is a study resource that gathers short fiction and essays from contemporary writers, including Kent Haruf, pairing each selection with author background and reflection questions about how ordinary life and Christian faith intersect.

Inspired by messages on early twentieth-century postcards, these stories imagine the private lives behind brief public notes. Miners, young wives, reporters, and dreamers speak in sharply different voices, revealing the hopes and losses hidden in ordinary correspondence.

Drawn from Butler’s creative-writing lectures, this craft book urges writers to begin with sensory experience and character desire. It offers a direct, demanding approach to voice, point of view, scene, and the emotional work of fiction.

In a daring set of flash pieces, Butler imagines the final rush of consciousness after decapitation. Historical figures, invented characters, animals, and mythic beings each receive a brief, intense last moment of memory and desire.

This flash-fiction collection pairs inner monologues from fifty couples during sex. Moving through myth, history, politics, and ordinary life, Butler uses intimate moments to explore fantasy, loneliness, self-invention, and the distance between two people.

Television anchor Hatcher McCord wakes up in Hell, surrounded by presidents, popes, Shakespeare, and Humphrey Bogart. When he discovers Satan may not be as all-knowing as he seems, Hatcher begins looking for a way out.

On the day her divorce should be finalized, Kelly Hays drives to a New Orleans hotel filled with memories of her marriage. As she and Michael revisit two decades of love and silence, one decision could change their family forever.

War correspondent Kit Cobb arrives in Vera Cruz during Mexico’s 1914 civil unrest and American occupation. After witnessing an attempted assassination, he digs into a sniper, German agents, and a local woman whose past is more complicated than it seems.

Assigned to watch a suspected German agent aboard the Lusitania, Kit Cobb becomes drawn to the elusive actress Selene Bourgani. After disaster at sea, he follows her through London and Istanbul, where her secrets threaten to widen the war.

In 1915, Kit Cobb investigates a suspected British mole while working beside his actor and spy mother, Isabel. Their pursuit leads from the English coast to Berlin, where a secret Zeppelin plan could reshape the war.

North Florida historian Robert Quinlan and his wife Darla live with the strains of a long marriage and an old family split over Vietnam. As Robert’s father nears death, an unexpected encounter brings the war’s aftershocks closer.

In wartime Paris, Kit Cobb is meant to report on American ambulance drivers, but his intelligence handler assigns him a darker task. A string of dynamite bombings sends the journalist-spy hunting for a German saboteur among refugees and shadows.

In 1922 Paris, journalist and spy Kit Cobb befriends Ernest Hemingway, whose early manuscript has vanished. Cobb follows the trail into a dangerous compound, where recovering a writer’s work could expose secrets with international consequences.

As the 2016 election results arrive, 115-year-old former newspaperman Sam Cunningham lies dying and looks back on his life. In conversation with God, he revisits war, work, fatherhood, love, and the mistakes that shaped an American century.