"An unrepeatable feat, a tour de force." --The Washington Post Book WorldIn Tabloid Dreams, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler dazzles with his mastery of the short story and his empathy for eccentric and ostracized characters. Using tabloid headlines as inspiration--"Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis," "Woman Struck by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac," and "JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction"--Butler moves from the fantastic to the realistic, exploring enduring concepts of exile, loss, aspiration, and the search for self. Along the way, the cast includes a woman who can see through her glass eye when it's removed from the socket, a widow who sets herself on fire after losing a baking competition, a nine-year-old hit man, and a woman who dates an extraterrestrial she met in a Walmart parking lot. Tabloid Dreams weaves a seamless tapestry of high and low culture, of the surreal, sordid, and humorously sad.
- ISBN10 0802120989
- ISBN13 9780802120984
- Publish Date 5 March 2013 (first published 1 October 1996)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 208
- Language English