Severance - Softcover

"Butler has one-upped himself....he has brought the dead back to life through the limitless will of his imagination." --The New York Times "Glorious, pure poetry....a deeply empathic experience for both writer and reader." --Los Angeles Times "A stream-of-consciousness masterpiece." --The Birmingham News "Robert Olen Butler...is a master of the performance piece. ...these stories capture and captivate the reader." --The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune "In concept, Severance is brilliant. In execution, it's even better--beautiful, hilarious, horrifying, and humane." --Dave Eggers "With Butler's signature mastery of language, Severance delivers a ghost chorus speaking with poetic urgency, and each of these finales leaves us shivering and breathless." --Amy Tan "Severance is a dazzling tour of history and humanity." --Ann Patchett

Robert Owen Butler, Pulitzer-prize winning author of "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain", is one of the most inventive writers of our time. This book is inspired by the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated facts: first, that the human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and one-half minutes after decapitation, and second, that, in a heightened state of emotion, we speak at the rate of 160 words per minute.Based on this maths, he has written sixty-two stories, each exactly 240 words in length, giving voice to the flow of thoughts and feelings that go through a person's mind in the minute and a half after their head has been severed. The beheadings are both real and imagined - of characters ranging from Valeria Messalina, beheaded by her husband, Emperor Claudius I of Rome in 48AD, to Anne Boleyn beheaded by Henry VIII in 1536, to a chicken beheaded for Sunday dinner in Alabama in 1958, to the author himself, decapitated on the job in 2008. The final thoughts are not morbid or macabre, but are a way of looking back on a person's life and the world they inhabited. Each is told with the intensity of poetry and the wit of a great storyteller.