Severance Review and Q-A

I reviewed Severance, the book of short stories of people who have been beheaded, and I got to interview the author.

Decapitation hardly seems like a suitable theme for a collection of elegant short stories, but Robert Olen Butler transcends morbidity while excavating the final thoughts from the lives of the beheaded. John the Baptist recalls the way Jesus smelled at his baptism. Marie Antoinette remembers her parents' royal titles. Nicole Brown Simpson sees O.J. in the faces of her children. And a barnyard chicken dreams of a great white clucking mother: "this at last is the hen who fills the sky, and I am rushing now along the path and the clucking is for me and it is very loud and a great wide road is suddenly before me and she is beyond and I cross."

Read the review here; the interview here.