Robert Olen Butler will be at Burke’s on Thursday, July 24th from 5-7pm to read from and sign copies of his new book, Intercourse: Stories (Chronicle, $22.95). The reading will begin at 6pm.

A provocative new short-story collection from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler, Intercourse delightfully reveals what goes through a person's mind at a crucial moment—during sex. Smart, provocative, subtle, and erotic, each story is a many faceted gem. Butler dazzles and entertains as he channels the most intimate thoughts of 50 couples, including:

Adam & Eve
Bonnie & Clyde
Pocahontas & John Smith
Richard Milhous Nixon & Pat Nixon
Walt Whitman & Oscar Wilde
Elvis Presley & Holly Singleton (admirer)
Princess Diana & Prince Charles
William Jefferson Clinton & Hillary Diane Rodham
Santa Claus & Ingebirgitta (elf)

Butler moves from death monologues (Severance) to "little death" monologues in this provocative collection of brief pieces that imagine what goes on in the minds of copulating couples. Many of the voices represent legendary romances, such as that of Napoleon and Josephine (she fantasizes about her lover the hussar while he resolves to shoot her annoying dog); William Shakespeare and the earl of Southampton ("I am pen and I am ink and I am his words"); and Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker ("it don't take me more than about three seconds... to know she's the one"). Adam lies with Eve after naming all things in nature, and Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln bed uncompanionably. There's J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson (thinks Tolson: "little did they know the truth about this great and powerful man"), Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, Robert Olen Butler and a Saigon hotel clerk (CNN is "muted on the TV screen"), and George and Laura Bush (he is "the guy who can whip your ass"). Butler seals the deal with crystalline prose, a dark imagination and some moments of light camp.

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.