Intercourse by Robert Olen Butler

From the Publisher

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)

Publishers Weekly

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. (June)

Kirkus Reviews

The latest from Pulitzer-winner Butler (Severance, 2006, etc.) consists of 50 pairs of brief lyrical monologues depicting the thoughts of people while engaged in sex. Butler has made a side career of short-form gimmickry. This brief volume fits squarely in that category. Here Butler inhabits mythological couples (Zeus and Leda, Santa and elf), historical couples (Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn), political couples (Bill and Hillary, George and Laura), animal couples (a rooster and a chicken) and so on. Sometimes the results dazzle. When J.W. Booth and an actress hook up on the 1863 night when the Lincolns saw Richard III, Butler not only probes Booth's psychology but has provocative things to say about the unknowability of actors, whose very masks have masks. He provides a charged account of Lizzie Borden's fling, years post-murder, with an actress rebelling against her own conventional parents; each woman uses the other, and here, as elsewhere in the book, sex seems lonely indeed. But Butler relies too often on strained lyricism (Shakespeare, for example, thinking, "a well dug deep and dark and I send my vessel down"), and the many entries about writer couples depend on Butler's skill with pastiche, a form in which he can seem ham-handed or jokey (Gertrude Stein's love-paean to Alice, for instance, ends with, "her mustache is her mustache is her mustache"). Too often the entries seem maddeningly brief and superficial.

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