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Synopsis
Now available in an elegant paperback, Robert Olen Butler's acclaimed collection, Severance, depicts the final thoughts of people as they are losing their heads. Celebrated as "glorious" (Los Angeles Times), these fascinating stories reveal "the limitless will of the author's imagination" (New York Times). Here are the imagined ultimate words of famous and invented figures—Medusa, Sir Walter Raleigh, Anne Boleyn, Jayne Mansfield, and a chicken, beheaded for Sunday dinner.
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From the Publisher
Excerpt from Severance:
ANNE BOLEYN
Queen of England, beheaded after the displeasure of her husband, King Henry VIII, 1536
Tiny and gray is the boy and I am undone, him being no living boy and no heir to my husband, though I hold his body close and I am breathless with love for him, and the next is merely a lump of blood between my legs and he was my last chance to live, this clot, this stain this wet-cleansed spot in my place of sex, but still there is my sweet girl my Elizabeth her pale face and her hair the color of the first touch of sun in the sky, the pale fire of her hair, she turns her gray eyes to me and I know I am soon to leave her and she is dressed in russet velvet and a purple satin cap with a caul of gold and the candlelight thrashes about the walls and I say to her Lady Princess I will always be your mother and she says in her wee voice madam you are my Queen and she bows as she has been taught and I ache to take her up but she is right, of course, we are who we are to each other and I am who I am to the man who must cast me off now, and I say rise my sweet child and she straightens and lifts her face and I bend to her, I draw near to her, I cup my daughter’s head in my hands
About the Author
Robert Olen Butler, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, is the author of many lauded works of fiction. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
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- PublisherChronicle Books
- Publication date2008
- ISBN 10 0811860981
- ISBN 13 9780811860987
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages264
- Rating
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Severance: Stories
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Severance: Stories
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Softcover. Condition: Good. Now available in an elegant paperback, Robert Olen Butler's acclaimed collection, Severance, depicts the final thoughts of people as they are losing their heads. Celebrated as "glorious" (Los Angeles Times), these fascinating stories reveal "the limitless will of the author's imagination" (New York Times). Here are the imagined ultimate words of famous and invented figures-Medusa, Sir Walter Raleigh, Anne Boleyn, Jayne Mansfield, and a chicken, beheaded for Sunday dinner. Seller Inventory # SONG0811860981
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Severance: Stories
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Severance: Stories
Published by
Chronicle Books, U.S.A., 2008
ISBN 10: 0811860981
ISBN 13: 9780811860987
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Seller: Mad Hatter Bookstore, Westbank, BC, Canada
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Soft cover. Condition: Fine. 1st Edition. Synopsis: Robert Owen Butler, Pulitzer-prize winning author of "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain", is one of the most inventive writers of our time. This book is inspired by the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated facts: first, that the human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and one-half minutes after decapitation, and second, that, in a heightened state of emotion, we speak at the rate of 160 words per minute.Based on this maths, he has written sixty-two stories, each exactly 240 words in length, giving voice to the flow of thoughts and feelings that go through a person's mind in the minute and a half after their head has been severed. The beheading's are both real and imagined - of characters ranging from Valeria Messalina, beheaded by her husband, Emperor Claudius I of Rome in 48AD, to Anne Boleyn beheaded by Henry VIII in 1536, to a chicken beheaded for Sunday dinner in Alabama in 1958, to the author himself, decapitated on the job in 2008. The final thoughts are not morbid or macabre, but are a way of looking back on a person's life and the world they inhabited. Each is told with the intensity of poetry and the wit of a great storyteller. Seller Inventory # 003592
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Severance: Stories
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