Robert Olen Butler

• Born: January 20, 1945
• Place of Birth: Granite City, Illinois

Biography

Robert Olen Butler was born in Granite City, Illinois, on January 20, 1945, the son of Robert Olen Butler Sr., a theater professor at St. Louis University, and Lucille Hall Butler, an executive secretary. Granite City, a steel-mill town in the St. Louis area, attracted exiles from the Deep South and the Midwest, bringing to the area what Butler terms “a collision of cultures.” In the summers of his college years, Butler worked in the steel mills and found himself as comfortable talking baseball with the other workers as he was talking aesthetics with his father and his father’s academic colleagues.

Butler received a BS in Oral Interpretation from Northwestern University in 1967. On his twenty-first birthday, he decided to write the words rather than act them. To this end, he enrolled in the University of Iowa to pursue a master’s degree in playwriting. Immediately after receiving his MA in 1969, Butler enlisted in the US Army, leading to service in the Vietnam War, an experience that deeply affected his life and his writing. Trained as a counterintelligence special agent and a Vietnamese linguist, Butler gained “professional proficiency” in the language after a full year of study. The immersion course was taught by a Vietnamese exile who gave Butler a glimpse into the Vietnamese culture and the struggle of an exile. Butler served his tour of duty in Saigon as administrative assistant to a US Foreign Service officer who was adviser to the mayor of Saigon.

Butler’s early experiences with a wide variety of people while growing up in Granite City and his Army service during the war are the two elements in his life that most strongly influenced his writing. In Vietnam, Butler came into contact with a wider variety of Vietnamese people than most Army personnel did. The quality of his contact with the Vietnamese and their culture was enhanced by his command of the language. His total immersion in Vietnam, its people, and its culture shaped the worldview that would become apparent in Butler’s fiction.

Following his stint in the military, Butler worked as a substitute high school teacher for a year in his hometown. In 1975, he became editor in chief of the New York City-based Energy User News, an investigative newspaper he created. During this time, it occurred to him that he should be writing fiction, not plays. He enrolled in postgraduate work in advanced creative writing at the New School for Social Research in New York City, studying fiction writing with Anatole Broyard. Butler wrote short stories that were published in such magazines as Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Fame, and Genre. He eventually turned to the longer and more satisfying form of the novel.

During the daily train commute from his office in Manhattan to his home in Sea Cliff, New York, Butler wrote his first novel, The Alleys of Eden (1981), in longhand on a lapboard. Twenty publishing houses rejected the novel. One publishing house, Methuen, brought the book to the galley stage before canceling it. Publishers doubted the novel’s marketability, believing that no one would want to read the story of an Army deserter and a Vietnamese prostitute. The Alleys of Eden was finally published to critical acclaim by Horizon Press.

In 1985, Butler assumed an assistant professorship at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he became the sole teacher of fiction writing in the university’s master of fine arts in creative writing program. He settled in Lake Charles, a city with a community of Vietnamese exiles, with his second wife, Maureen, and his son from his first marriage, Joshua Robert. Butler married again, to writer Elizabeth Dewberry, before marrying a fifth time to Kelly Lee Daniels. Butler's sixth marriage, to Clara Guzman Herrera in 2022, ended with her death in 2024.

Butler has received many awards for his fiction, most notably the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his 1992 collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Additionally, he was a charter recipient, along with only three other fiction writers, of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Since 2000, Butler has been Eppes Professor of Creative Writing at Florida State University. In the fall of 2001, Butler wrote a short story, “This Is Earl Sandt,” from first conception to final draft in seventeen real-time Internet Webcasts to demonstrate the creative process. The story appears in the collection Had a Good Time (2004), and the entire event is archived at www.fsu.edu/butler.

After publishing another collection of short stories designed to imagine people's emotions and thoughts following decapitation titled Severance (2006) in addition to one titled Intercourse (2008), which explores the thoughts that go through people's minds during sexual intercourse, Butler returned to the novel format with Hell (2009), a satire that takes place in the underworld. Continuing to explore a variety of topics in his writing, he followed the online short-story collection Weegee Stories (2010) with the novels A Small Hotel (2011), The Hot Country (2012), The Star of Istanbul (2013), The Empire of Night (2014), Perfume River (2016), Paris in the Dark (2018), and Late City (2021). In 2013, he received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature.

Analysis

In a 1993 interview, Butler noted that his military service, his intimate encounter with the people of Vietnam, and his intense experience with the ravishing sensuality of that country turned him into a fiction writer. Butler said, “I had the impulse—that is the impulse of art which is a deep but inchoate conviction that the world makes sense under its surface disorder or chaos—I wanted to write to articulate that vision.”

Butler’s experience in Vietnam served as the basis for three of his major novels, The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs (1982), and On Distant Ground (1985). The major theme of this Vietnam War trilogy is the outsider abroad and at home, an alien in a country at war and an alien in his own country after the war. The three novels share characters, incidents, scenes, and symbols. In these novels, the protagonists are all soldiers who have served together as part of an American intelligence-interrogation unit stationed near Saigon.

In The Alleys of Eden, Clifford Wilkes is an Army deserter who escapes from Vietnam during the fall of Saigon with Lanh, his lover, a Vietnamese bargirl. Wilson Hand, Wilkes’s fellow soldier and the protagonist of Sun Dogs, carries the war with him in his soul to the oil fields of Alaska, where he is on an investigative mission that uncovers industrial espionage. On Distant Ground is the story of the court martial of David Fleming, a fellow enlisted man of Wilkes and Hand, who becomes obsessed with the notion that he has a son in Vietnam, whom he returns to that country to find.

In this trilogy, which critic Philip D. Beidler has called “a master vision of Vietnam memory,” Butler fashions archetypal scenes of war that personalize the Vietnam experience for the protagonists. In The Alleys of Eden, Clifford Wilkes is part of the American torture-interrogation squad (of which David Fleming is a member) that deals with a Viet Cong prisoner. The prisoner is stripped naked and lies near a stream. The American soldiers place a wet handkerchief over the prisoner’s face to torture him during his interrogation. The prisoner suffers a heart attack and dies.

For Wilson Hand in Sun Dogs, the scene is his kidnapping by the Viet Cong during a visit to an American-supported orphanage. The novel records Hand’s ensuing solitary confinement and eventual rescue by David Fleming in a mission where all of Hand’s captors are slaughtered.

In On Distant Ground, the crucial scene occurs between David Fleming and a Viet Cong prisoner, Tuyen, who has scrawled, “Hygiene is Beautiful” on a prison-cell wall. Fleming sees the graffiti as his mental link to Tuyen, and he liberates his foe, which leads to Fleming’s court martial and eventual return to Vietnam to find the son he believes is the product of an affair he had with a Vietnamese woman. In each case, these scenes are interspersed in the texts, creating the effect that they might be the memories of the reader, which Butler says is his aim.

In Countrymen of Bones (1983) and Wabash (1987), Butler chooses the burden of American history as his theme. Countrymen of Bones takes place at Alamogordo, New Mexico, and a nuclear test site in the nearby desert. The conflict of the novel is between Darrell Reeves, an archaeologist who wants to preserve a burial-ground excavation, and Lloyd Coulter, a scientist and disciple of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who helped to design the atomic bomb. The burial ground represents a vanished culture unspoiled by American culture; the test site represents the overpowering, destructive force of American culture. The conflict between Reeves and Coulter is also played out in their shared pursuit of a woman who represents the salvation of love for Reeves and an object of obsession for Coulter.

Wabash, set in Wabash, Illinois, the fictional version of Butler’s hometown of Granite City, is the story of Jeremy Cole and his wife, Deborah. Jeremy’s story addresses the economic and political exploitation of workers and the attendant forces of revolution. Deborah’s story concerns itself with domestic conflict, as she navigates the worlds of her relatives and her marriage in an attempt to reconcile the two. As in Butler’s other novels, the possibilities of love in Countrymen of Bones and Wabash are redemptive forces that free the protagonists from the cultural dictates of society.

The Deuce (1989), Butler’s sixth novel, is his first novel in which the point of view is that of a Vietnamese boy. It is written in the voice of a sixteen-year-old Amerasian boy, Tony Hatcher. Snatched from his bargirl mother in Saigon by his father, a former Army officer turned district attorney, Tony grows up as unhappy in affluence on the Jersey Shore as he was while a despised mixed-blood child in Saigon. Running away from home, Tony finds himself in New York City, where he must come to terms with his dual heritage and with America. In The Deuce, Butler addresses the theme of a collision of cultures by showing two cultures united in the mind and body of a single human being.

This theme is again addressed in all fifteen of the short stories that make up Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Each of the stories is told from the point of view of a Vietnamese expatriate living in the United States, an experience that gives resonance to the historical term “New World.” Just as the soldiers in Butler’s Vietnam trilogy are aliens in a strange land, so are the diverse narrators of these stories of love and betrayal, myth and tradition, wartime and peacetime. Butler shows that the experience of Vietnamese Americans is the human experience, with all of its pain and joy. Butler’s second collection of short stories, Tabloid Dreams(1996), takes lurid tabloid-style titles (“Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot”) and then transforms and humanizes the absurd premises by delving into the consciousness of the characters involved.

In They Whisper (1994), Butler explores the erotic reminiscences of thirty-five-year-old Ira Holloway, whose first-person narration is interspersed with his attempts to “give word to whispers” by recreating the voices of the women he has loved. The Deep Green Sea (1997), a love story with the Vietnam War in the background, creates a similar effect of multiple first-person narrations as Butler alternates between the points of view of Le Thi Tien, a Vietnamese woman, and Ben Cole, an American veteran. Mr. Spaceman (2000), a fantasy about the first alien visitor to publicly reveal himself to humans, seems in many ways distant from Butler’s other generally realistic novels, but may also be seen as merely an extension of his trademark theme of the combination of multiple cultures and psyches within a single character. Desi, the empathetic alien who absorbs the thoughts of twelve very different humans, is simply the most literal version of Butler’s many characters who need to understand alien cultures and ideas. Fair Warning (2002) was expanded from a short story commissioned for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope magazine into a novel about a forty-year-old female auctioneer’s search for love and authenticity.

Butler produced his third volume of short stories with Had a Good Time (2004), writing fifteen stories directly inspired by old American postcards from his personal collection. The postcards were all written in the early twentieth century, giving the collection an overall focus and unity, but Butler’s imaginative development of the brief messages produces a typically varied range of distinctive first-person narratives. Butler’s two decades as a teacher of creative writing are represented with a nonfiction guide for writers, From Where You Dream (2005), edited from a series of his classroom lectures.

The Alleys of Eden

First published: 1981

Type of work: Novel

A US Army deserter and a Vietnamese prostitute flee Saigon for the United States, where their relationship cannot withstand the clash of cultures.

Butler’s first published novel, The Alleys of Eden, explores his often-repeated theme of the spiritual and cultural displacement of people by the Vietnam War. The book tells the story of US Army Intelligence officer Clifford Wilkes and his girlfriend, Lanh, a Vietnamese bargirl.

When a prisoner he is interrogating dies of a sudden heart attack, Wilkes decides to desert; he feels that he can no longer believe in the United States, a country defined in his view by vanity and arrogance. He goes to live in an apartment on a Saigon alley with a bargirl named Lanh. She wonders why Wilkes loves her, as they are so different, both physically and culturally, from each other. Wilkes is as attracted to Lanh as he is to her country. For him, Vietnam has an integrity, a sense of self that he believes America no longer possesses. Lanh comes to understand this and tells Wilkes what he cannot articulate: that he can no longer go home because home is a place where a person feels innocent. She knows that Wilkes will no longer feel innocent in America. Butler writes, “The country he left was empty, the country he was in was doomed.”

During the fall of Saigon, Wilkes and Lanh flee Vietnam for the United States and an Illinois town. In the United States, Wilkes is a fugitive, and Lanh, who speaks no English, is overwhelmed. Everything about the Midwest scares Lanh, even the size of the people. She points out that she “did not feel Vietnamese in Vietnam,” but she feels Vietnamese in America, a stranger in a strange world.

As Lanh’s sense of cultural displacement intensifies, her relationship with Wilkes unravels. Wilkes tries to save their relationship until he finds Lanh praying one day. He asks what she is praying for, and she answers that she does not know. As Lanh’s personality diminishes, Wilkes comes to understand that the woman he loves is being tortured, just as they believed they would have been tortured if they had remained in Saigon. The torture, however, is not physical; it is mental and is inflicted upon them both by the collision of cultures they find in America. Lanh goes to live with a Vietnamese family, where she at least has her language. Wilkes, who had expected to feel like a stranger in America, finds his growing retrospective alienation with Vietnam to be something he had not expected. Wilkes flees to Canada and leaves Lanh to live with the American representatives of her people, the Binh family.

In The Alleys of Eden, Butler writes about the American misadventure in Vietnam. The sexual collision between the American soldiers and Vietnamese prostitutes serves as a symbol of the war, just as the clash of cultures heightens the sense of a war fought on American soil. The Alleys of Eden provides a vision of what it is to be American and what it is to be Vietnamese.

“Snow”

First published: 1992 (collected in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, 1992)

Type of work: Short story

A Vietnamese American woman makes a personal connection with a Jewish widower and comes to understand that despite culture or religion, people are fundamentally alike.

In “Snow,” a short story from his 1992 Pulitzer Prize–winning short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Butler weaves the tale of a Vietnamese refugee, Giàu, and a Jewish lawyer, Mr. Cohen. Butler’s theme is once again the fracturing of community by the alienating sense of dislocation felt by outsiders.

On Christmas Eve, Giàu is working in the Plantation Hunan restaurant in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The product of a patriarchal society, she is a woman without a man, a position she finds uncomfortable. Everything about America makes her feel alien. In America, people are Christian; she is Buddhist. In America, people are always concerned about time; she had not seen a clock until she came to America (however, she likes the name of the “grandfather” clock, which conjures comforting images for her). She does not feel like those who live in the Vietnamese community in Lake Charles; she does not feel like a “real” American, like she supposes others do. Giàu compares herself to the building housing the restaurant, a former plantation home, noting that the life of a restaurant is not the life the house once knew.

Giàu remembers the first time she saw snow, while working in a St. Louis restaurant. The snow covered all that was familiar to her, frightening her. Just as she is frightened of snow, she is frightened to live her life without a man. When Mr. Cohen walks into the Plantation Hunan, she finds refuge in his face, as if it is a place to hide from the snow. She finds his voice reassuring, like a grandfather’s voice. She asks why he is not celebrating Christmas. He explains that it is not the custom of Jews.

Mr. Cohen, a Polish man also displaced in America, is also afraid of snow, which reminds him of his father’s death. His father’s literal death is linked to the metaphorical death of his Polish and Jewish heritage through his displacement to America. Giàu understands this; it is how she, too, feels. When she saw the snow, she realized that her culture was lost to her. She adds, “I was dead, too.”

“Snow” ends on an optimistic note when Mr. Cohen and Giàu agree to a New Year’s Eve date. In the story’s ending, Butler fuses images and metaphors, cultures and people. Giàu knows, just as her Vietnamese brothers and sisters know, that people should celebrate whatever holiday comes along. She sits in the restaurant, waiting for Mr. Cohen, listening to Grandfather, the clock, tell his story of time. She still has time to make her life whole, to recapture her culture. As two people displaced from their cultures, Giàu and Mr. Cohen can find wholeness and completion in each another as they together face the demands of their new world, the demands of America.

“Crickets”

First published: 1992 (collected in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, 1992)

Type of work: Short story

A Vietnamese father learns to accept the Americanization of his son when he attempts to teach his son a Vietnamese game, Crickets.

From the short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, “Crickets” is the story of a Vietnamese family displaced to Lake Charles, Louisiana, and the rift that develops between a father who would like to retain his Vietnamese heritage and a son who prefers all things American. Butler repeats his trope of the collision of cultures, this time as embodied in a second-generation Vietnamese American.

Thiệu is a chemical engineer in a Lake Charles refinery. His American coworkers insist upon calling him Ted; he believes that they call him Ted because they want to think of him as one of them. Thiệu knows that he will never truly be one of them; everything about him and them is so radically different, right down to size. He gives in to the name change because he believes that he has done enough fighting for one lifetime.

As part of the acculturation process, Thiệu has given his son an American name, Bill. The son speaks no Vietnamese and is embarrassed when his father tells him goodbye in Vietnamese. In an attempt to instill some of his heritage in his son, Thiệu decides to teach his son one of his own childhood games from Vietnam, Crickets. Thiệu has difficulty in keeping his son engaged as he explains the game and as they search for crickets.

Thiệu tells his son that there are two types of crickets, charcoal crickets and fire crickets. The charcoal crickets are large and strong but slow and easily confused. The fire crickets are small and brown, not as strong as the charcoal crickets but very smart and quick. The fights between the two types of crickets take place in a paper tunnel made for the game. The game Thiệu explains to his son cannot take place, however, because they can find no fire crickets. Bill loses all interest in the game when he sees that he has soiled his Reebok tennis shoes. Thiệu continues the search for fire crickets but finds none. He comes to believe that a fire cricket is a precious and admirable thing.

The game symbolizes the struggle between the Americans and Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. The charcoal crickets represent the Americans; the fire crickets represent the Vietnamese. Because he lives in America, Thiệu cannot find any fire crickets. Just as there are no fire crickets to fight the charcoal crickets, Thiệu decides not to fight his son’s Americanization any longer. Thiệu understands that his son’s concern over a pair of Reeboks, a symbol of America, is more important than the boy’s lack of interest in the game, a symbol of the Vietnam of Thiệu’s past, a Vietnam that does not exist for Bill. The next morning, when Bill leaves for school, Thiệu tells him goodbye in English rather than Vietnamese.

“A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain”

First published: 1992 (collected in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, 1992)

Type of work: Short story

An old Vietnamese man converses with Ho Chi Minh’s ghost and gradually realizes that his son-in-law and grandson are implicated in a recent political murder.

The title story in Butler’s 1992 collection begins with Dao, a very old Vietnamese man who now lives in New Orleans with his family, recounting his most recent dream in which he is visited by the ghost of former Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, whom he had known in London in 1917 and in Paris in 1918. Dao’s three dreamed conversations with Ho Chi Minh alternate with his narration of scenes in which he becomes convinced that his extended family is keeping a secret from him. He suspects, however, that the mystery is connected with the recent murder of the publisher of a Vietnamese newspaper in New Orleans. Dao engages in dream conversations with Ho Chi Minh in which they debate the two divergent paths they chose: Dao became a Buddhist, and Ho Chi Minh led a political revolution and then a war. Dao finally comes to realize that his son-in-law and grandson were directly involved in the recent political murder.

Dao’s story interlaces the past and his dreams with the present, a plot structure realistically motivated by the aging narrator’s inability to separate reality and fantasy, past and present. At the level of technique, this intertwining of the three strands is reinforced with multiple patterns of imagery. The title of both the story and the book, the image of “a good scent from a strange mountain,” illustrates Butler’s method. The phrase itself is a translation of the four Chinese characters Bao Son Ky Huong, the saying of the Hoa Haos, the Buddhist sect to which Dao belongs. The story uses a variety of scents, particularly that of sugar (Ho Chi Minh had been a pastry cook) as vehicles for exploring and giving nuance to the story’s main themes.

The three subplots of historical narrative, fantasy encounter, and contemporary violence intertwine to make the thematic point that the causes and effects of the Vietnam War extend deep into the past, involve spiritual as well as political issues, and, perhaps most significantly, that they persist today, not just in Vietnam but in the United States. Ho Chi Minh’s decision to follow the Western materialist teachings of Karl Marx and Dao’s decision to follow the Eastern spiritual teachings of Buddha represent a split within the national character that is simultaneously political and psychological, fragmenting both the nation and its individuals. Whether this political and psychic fragmentation can ever be brought together again is left ambiguous at the end.

“Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot”

First published: 1996 (collected in Tabloid Dreams, 1996)

Type of work: Short story

A jealous man is reincarnated as a parrot in a pet store, then bought as a pet by his former wife.

As the title promises, the story revolves around a compulsively jealous husband, who is, as the story opens, sitting on a perch in a cage in a pet store in Houston, reincarnated somehow as a parrot. The reincarnation of the human narrator’s consciousness into the animal body is established as the opening premise with the very title and is never explained. However, once Butler makes this stipulation, the story proceeds realistically. Rather than simply imagining a person in a parrot suit, Butler imagines the limitations of the parrot’s brain and nervous system. When his former wife, who enters the store and is drawn to him, says, “Hello,” he can say it back, but when she then says “Pretty bird,” he can only repeat “Hello”: “She said it again, ’Pretty bird,’ and this brain that works like it does now could feel that tiny little voice of mine ready to shape itself around those sounds.” Butler thus provides a foundation for both the recognizably human aspects of the tale and the animal point of view that defamiliarizes them for the reader. The initial encounter with his former wife exemplifies the method: “She knows that to pet a bird you don’t smooth his feathers down, you ruffle them. But of course she did that in my human life as well.”

She buys him and keeps him in a cage in his former den. The physical transformation of the narrator provides opportunity for comedy, while his more gradual psychological transformation provides the primary thematic elements. At first jealous and combative toward his wife’s lovers (he waits for one “to draw close enough for me to take off the tip of his finger”), he comes to love his wife more than he had when alive, to regret his own failures in their relationship, and even to feel pity for her latest lover. He realizes that his consciousness had always been divided, that he had always had another creature inside who might have felt love while he had only felt jealousy and anger. Butler contrives, however, to leave it an open question as to how much of the narrator’s emotional change is genuine compassion brought about by his new perspective and how much of it is merely the effect of the supplanting of his human emotional responses by his increasingly parrotlike nature.

One day his wife left the door to his cage open, and he tried to fly to freedom only to fly headfirst into sliding glass doors. He resolves nevertheless to continue to throw himself against the glass. By the end of the tale, the avian elements predominate, but the human narrator’s presence, once established, cannot be forgotten, and his final desire for flight and freedom, even at the cost of his life, must be read both literally and metaphorically as a desire shared by the human and the bird. The story ends with the implication that his response to this new existence may have the same fatal result as his response to his former situation. As in Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis, 1936), which provides one of the few close literary analogues to Butler’s tale, the reader is led to consider whether the transformation is really as profound at all levels as one might initially suppose.

Summary

In his novels and short stories, Butler depicts characters that are haunted by the past, ambivalent about the present, and in search of truce for the various wars—not just Vietnam—that they carry within them. Butler’s ceaseless experimentation with techniques for representing unusual voices has led to his being lauded as “our pre-eminent practitioner of first-person narrative.”

Bibliography

Beidler, Philip D. Re-writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation. U of Georgia P, 1991.

Butler, Robert Olen. Death of Clara Guzman Herrera. Facebook, 28 Aug. 2024, 9:14 a.m., www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story‗fbid=pfbid0mkA2ooxV4v4HXjgXdJd1pDF4LjPgwyZTpsCQxuDh65wT8PmAzqtN6xVbtEsUesnil&id=1066253840. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Butler, Robert Olen. “An Interview with Robert Olen Butler.” Interview by Michael Kelsay. Poets and Writers, Jan./Feb. 1996, pp. 40–49.

Butler, Robert Olen. "Robert Olen Butler Interview: The Art of Yearning." Interview by Ryan G. Van Cleave. The Writer, 25 Apr. 2017, www.writermag.com/2017/04/25/robert-olen-butler/. Accessed 30 Nov. 2017.

Diskin, Trayce. “From Tabloid to Truth: Using Tabloid Dreams to Inspire Powerful Fiction.” English Journal, vol. 89, no. 4, 2000, pp. 58–65.

Ewell, Barbara. “Tabloid Dreams.” America, 17 May 1997, pp. 28–29.

Herzog, Tobey C. “Conversation with Robert Olen Butler.” Writing Vietnam, Writing Life: Caputo, Heinemann, O’Brien, Butler, U of Iowa P, 2008.

Jason, Philip K. “Vietnamese in America: Literary Representations.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 20, no. 3, 1997, pp. 43–50.

Kelsay, Michael. “An Interview with Robert Olen Butler.” Poets and Writers, vol. 24, no. 3, 1996, pp. 40–49.

Packer, George. “From the Mekong to the Bayous.” The New York Times Book Review, 7 June 1992.

Ryan, Maureen. “Robert Olen Butler’s Vietnam Veterans: Strangers in an Alien Home.” Midwest Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 3, 1997, pp. 274–95.

Schulman, Candy. “My First Novel: Good News for Unpublished Novelists.” Writer’s Digest, vol. 63, 1983.