Robert Olen Butler

Autumn 1915. World War I is raging across Europe but Woodrow Wilson has kept Americans out of the trenches--though that hasn't stopped young men and women from crossing the Atlantic to volunteer at the front. Christopher "Kit" Cobb, a Chicago reporter with a second job as undercover agent for the U.S. government, is officially in Paris doing a story on American ambulance drivers, but his intelligence handler, James Polk Trask, soon broadens his mission....

"A visionary and deeply moving novel centered around former newspaperman Sam Cunningham as he prepares to die, Late City covers much of the early twentieth century, unfurling as a conversation between the dying man and a surprising God. As the two review Sam's life, from his childhood in the American South and his time in the French trenches during World War I to a newspaper career in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties and the decades that follow, moments...

Christopher Marlowe ("Kit") Cobb, an early 20th-century American war correspondent reporting on Mexico's civil war, witnesses the attempted assassination of a priest and the arrival of strange ships bearing German officials.

"In the thrilling third installment of the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, Kit discovers a secret plan to transform Zeppelins into dangerous killing machines--and to turn the tide of war in Germany's favor" -- "[I]t is 1917, and the United States is wavering on the brink of war. Kit [Christopher Marlowe Cobb] is now a full-blown spy in England, working undercover in a castle on the Kentish coast owned by a suspected British government mole named...

"With a world full of foolishly dangerous men, what's a mother to do?... Edward was my only living child, Private Edward Marcus Gaines of the 108th Infantry, 27th Division, Company such-and-such. I had it written down in his letter. In a trench in a place in France..." - From Mother in the Trenches by Robert Olen Butler

What happens to people's lives during times of battle and strife? From the American Revolution to the ongoing

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Twelve off-beat stories. In JFK Secretly Attends Jackie's Auction, President Kennedy, who survived the assassination and is a prisoner of the CIA, is allowed to attend an auction of his wife's property, while in Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot, a husband reincarnated as a parrot tries to make amends to his wife who now owns him.

Fair Warning is acclaimed novelist Robert Olen Butler's enthralling glimpse into a Manhattan auction house that caters to the shopping pheromones of the rich and powerful. At age forty, the company's charismatic star employee, Amy Dickerson, is capable of selling a Renoir painting of a pudgy nude for twice its value. Her customers are intoxicated by the objects they covet. And sometimes, such as when the dark and mysterious Trevor locks eyes with...

Former Chicago journalist turned globe-trotting spy Christopher Marlowe Cobb has already lived many lives-from London to Mexico to Berlin-when he returns to France in 1922. Where better to work on his novel than among such literary expatriates as Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford, who convene at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in postwar Paris? Among them is Ernest Hemingway, fellow lone-wolf war correspondent, new friend, and confidante. Like Cobb,...

Robert Quinlan is a seventy-year-old historian teaching at Florida State University, where his wife Darla is also tenured. Their marriage, forged in the fervor of anti-Vietnam War protests, now bears the fractures of time, both personal and historical, with the couple trapped in an existence of morning coffee and solitary jogging and separate offices. For Robert and Darla, the cracks remain under the surface, whereas the divisions in Robert's own...