Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Editorials
From the Publisher
Praise for Tabloid Dreams:"It is Mr. Butler’s genius in this volume to lure an audience into the tent by shouting versions of the tabloids’ headlines . . . and then providing more than the customer has been led to expect. Turning the lurid third-person titles of his stories into direct testimony from the principles, Mr. Butler often transforms the material’s coarseness—and a reader’s anticipated guffaws—into lyricism and wonder." —The New York Times Book Review
"These stories are a real achievement and a true surprise . . . Butler peels back the sleazy veneer of the sensational to expose characters who long for love and the healing comfort of human compassion." —USA Today
"To see, to know, to touch, to remember—these desires have always been at the heart of great fiction. They are here in abundance, along with the skewed and comic tenderness that is Butler’s greatest gift as a writer. You start to read these stories and laugh; then, sucker-punched, you see the sadness and sweetness in each one." —The Times-Picayune
"Out of pop culture, Robert Olen Butler extracts a result that looks uncomplicated, but subtly reveals many of the preoccupations of American literature—especially loneliness, conformity and innocence." —The Boston Globe
"These stories are masterpieces of accessible complexity—jewels of poignancy molded from what is generally considered a slag heap of modern culture. Tabloid Dreams is a magnificent work of imagination, entertainment and humanity." —Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
"Daring and uncommonly beautiful literary flights of fancy. There are touches of Italo Calvino, Roald Dahl, and Gabriel García Márquez in them. At the same time, Tabloid Dreams couldn’t be more American in premise, flavor and humor . . . [it] makes its dozen fanciful tales not just real to its readers, but also sublimely reasonable." —San Francisco Chronicle
"A hugely entertaining, sometimes dazzling collection from one of our most versatile writers." —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"There’s a beautiful liquidity both to Butler’s prose and to his imagination. Sex and death hold hands and dance in Tabloid Dreams . . . And yet these aren’t sad stories. They’re too funny for that. And in almost every one, there’s a moment of transcendence; for every character, redemption glimmers." —Wisconsin State Journal
"Butler has taken a ham’s material and fashioned it into a dozen artful and wondrous tales, once again proving himself to be the rarest kind of writer, one who can’t be pigeonholed, who doesn’t rely on a set, safe shtick but keeps challenging himself with new and varied material." —Chicago Tribune
"Straightforward, surreal, hilarious, shocking and ultimately very moving . . . It’s hard to imagine another writer who could achieve such pathos, humor and intensity from such an absurd situation . . . Playwrights come first to mind: Ionesco and Beckett." —St. Petersburg Times
"Every story in this collection deserves a prize. Originality, humor, distinctive voices, drop-dead prose—Butler possesses all these qualities, and he lends them to every story." —The Hudson Review
"Butler has a remarkable facility for finding the heart in otherwise trashy lives . . . In trash, suggests Butler, there can always be transcendence." —The Village Voice
"Tabloid Dreams is full-blown American magical realism: funny, lyrical, striking, its stories seek and find meaning in our very own myths, the ones we characteristically reinvent every few years to fit our fears and fantasies . . . Butler and his characters convince us that concepts such as conscience, justice, and love are meaningful and necessary, even in a culture whose stock-in-trade is bunk." —Boston Book Review
Katherine Whittemore
Worrisome, the cover design of Tabloid Dreams, which shows a big glass eyeball gleaming against a lurid purplish backdrop. Too high concept, you think, too gimmicky. The allusion is to "Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philadelphia Husband," one of 12 tabloid headlines Butler uses as inspiration for his new, uneven, story collection. "I go over to where [the eye] is lying on the rug and I look down," the spying woman narrates. "And I look up. At the same time." We understand the eye is a metaphor for clarity; if you could truly see your husband cheating, you'd leave, not equivocate. Especially after his lover sticks said eye in her navel "like a belly dancer's jewel." Talk about the last straw.
Unfortunately, too many of these tales read like fiction workshop exercises ù clever, but more attention-getting than anything else. "Woman Loses Cookie Bake-Off, Sets Self on Fire," and "Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover," in particular, deploy a countrified, banal, near-patronizing tone. Like this cartoonish detail from "Every Man She Kisses Dies": "I go into the drawer in the nightstand and I pull out a foil pack and I tear it open and it's wax lips, big red wax lips, and I put them on ... "
When Butler leaves the archness behind, he can write movingly, as his Pulitzer-prize winning story collection, "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain," attests. This is the case with the first and last tales in this book, which exhibit a fine and wistful tone. They're told from the perspective of two passengers on the Titanic and succeed, perhaps, because Butler writes in a 1912-ish style (the year of the disaster), thus avoiding the prose pitfalls of his more aggressively "contemporary" fiction.
To wit: "All this floating about seems much too casual to me," states the starched British civil servant and sinking victim, whose essence dissolved in the floe-chocked North Atlantic, churned through various rivers, only to end up in a waterbed. "I expected something more rigorous in the afterlife," he continues. "A propitiary formality. A sensible accounting. Order. But there has been no sign, as yet, of that King of Kings." The young suffragette he saves in the first story reflects on this salvation in story two. "I told him I did not know why I should live and he said 'Because I ask you to.'"
Lovely words. Dreamy words. Not tabloid-like at all ù which is why these few stories work, and the others, sadly, just don't. -- Salon