A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by Robert Olen Butler

Overview

Robert Olen Butler's lyrical and poignant collection of stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Now Grove Press is proud to reissue this contemporary classic by one of America's most important living writers, in a new edition of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain that includes two subsequently published stories — "Salem" and "Missing" — that brilliantly complete the collection's narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802137982
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	04/05/2001
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)
Lexile:	1070L (what's this?)

Editorial Reviews

In a short span of time, many Vietnamese immigrants to the United States have quietly made good in their adopted country. Butler, who served in Vietnam as a translator, now has given this silent community a voice. The first-person narrators in these tales explore both the old country and the new (primarily Louisiana), as well as the realm of the spirits. Each story unfolds like a delicate paper fan, with startling, ghostly images hiding in every crevice. While many writers have finely described the daily grind of the immigrant experience, Butler has gone one step further, evoking the collective unconscious of a displaced population. Recommended for all literary fiction collections and essential for libraries seeking to expand Asian American literature collections.-- Rita Ciresi, Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park

Library Journal

The number of novels and short-story collections about the Vietnam War is now approaching 500. Were I to recommend a single volume that poignantly shows the magnitude and the humanity of the tragedy, it would be this one.
—The Detroit News

John Clark Pratt

Butler's achievement is not only to reveal the inner lives of the Vietnamese, but to show, through their eyes, how the rest of us appear from an outside perspective.
—Chicago Tribune

Madison Smartt Bell