Severance / Intercourse

Description

The human head remains in a state of consciousness for one and a half minutes after decapitation. In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at a rate of 160 words per minute. Inspired by this, Robert Olen Butler wrote Severance, 62 vignettes each 240 words in length, capturing the flow of thoughts that go through a person's mind after their head has been severed. Then, in Intercourse, he addressed another question: what goes through the mind of a person while having sex? Intercourse lays bare the most flagrant, personal thoughts and feelings of fifty couples.

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and sixteen other novels including Hell, A Small Hotel, Perfume River, and the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series. He is also the author of six short story collections and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and received the 2013 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

Experimental writing in its purest form... This is a beautifully designed, reversible double offering; a curio in form as well as content. A must for fans of sex and death -- Alan Bett * The Skinny * light-flashing-before-the-eye distillations of life [...] sweet, but disturbing * Shortlist *