Product Description
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)
Product Details
| Publisher | Chronicle Books |
| Format |
|
| Author | Robert Olen Butler |
| Label | Chronicle Books |
| Dewey Decimal Number | 813.54 |
| Studio | Chronicle Books |
| Number Of Pages | 216 |
| Title | Intercourse: Stories |
| Publication Date | 2008-05-28 |
| Manufacturer | Chronicle Books |
Customer Reviews
Talking During SexReview by Amos Lassen, 2008-08-09
Butler, Robert Olen. "Intercourse: Stories", Chronicle Books, 2008.
Talking During Sex
Amos Lassen
Robert Butler has written a collection of stories about what fifty couples talk about while having sex. He further identifies each pair of loves not only by name but by age and occupation as well. He puts them in a place having to do with their lives, gives them an occasion and a date and then lets them talk. He uses couples from all periods of time--Adam and Eve, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Shakespeare and the third Earl of Southampton, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, George and Laura Bush, J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson, the Prince and Princess of Wales and a host of others.
The dialog is hysterical even though most speak rather poetically and there is wonderful parody here when Butler is not too serious. I think my favorite line is when Gertrude Stein says of Alice B. Toklas, "her mustache is her mustache is her mustache".
The women here come across as vain and full of contempt; the men seem to think they are what they are not. I have read a review that considers the dialog between the sexual partners as insipid and not erotic and the whole concept of the book as childish and "asinine". I found it delightful, irreverent and fun.
