“Originality, humor, distinctive voices, drop-dead prose—Butler possesses all these qualities” —The Hudson Review
Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler (Tabloid Dreams) returns to form with this beautifully wrought, satiric journey from the Civil War to the political frenzy of 2024. Citizen Parrot is an absurd, touching, and redemptive allegory of personal and social unrest
ISBN: Trade paperback $18.95; Digital formats $9.99
Published: March 2027
Available Format(s): Trade paperback, Digital
He lost his voice. Then he gained wings. Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler returns with this beautifully wrought, satiric journey from the Civil War to the political frenzy of 2024.
It is a strange day when a man wakes up in the body of a barely verbal parrot. It is even stranger when the Parrot is promptly purchased by his ex-wife and brought to live in his own home with her new lover. But when his cage is left open, the Parrot soars into contemporary America—a land where everyone talks and no one listens.
From his mother who doesn’t recognize him, to a young girl who wants to adopt him, to a crow haunted by the Civil War, the Parrot collects words like ammunition in a world where discourse has gone mad.
Inspired by Butler’s acclaimed New Yorker story, Citizen Parrot is an absurd, touching, and redemptive allegory of personal and social unrest. Recalling the imaginative works of Cervantes, Twain, and Allende, this bold, picaresque journey takes us through the perils and promise of modern America.
Praise for Robert Olen Butler
“Out of pop culture, Robert Olen Butler extracts a result that looks uncomplicated, but subtly reveals many of the preoccupations of American literature—especially loneliness, conformity and innocence.” —The Boston Globe
“Straightforward, surreal, hilarious, shocking and ultimately very moving. . . . It’s hard to imagine another writer who could achieve such pathos, humor and intensity from such an absurd situation. . . . Playwrights come first to mind: Ionesco and Beckett.” —St. Petersburg Times
Praise for Tabloid Dreams
“It is Mr. Butler’s genius in this volume to lure an audience into the tent by shouting versions of the tabloids’ headlines—‘Every Man She Kisses Dies,’ ‘Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot’—and then providing more than the customer has been led to expect. Turning the lurid third-person titles of his stories into direct testimony from the principals, Mr. Butler often transforms the material’s coarseness—and a reader’s anticipated guffaws—into lyricism and wonder.” —Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review
“To see, to know, to touch, to remember—these desires have always been at the heart of great fiction. They are here in abundance, along with the skewed and comic tenderness that is Butler’s greatest gift as a writer. You start to read these stories and laugh; then, sucker-punched, you see the sadness and sweetness in each one.” —The Times-Picayune
“These stories are masterpieces of accessible complexity—jewels of poignancy molded from what is generally considered a slag heap of modern culture. Tabloid Dreams is a magnificent work of imagination, entertainment and humanity. “ —SunSentinel (Ft. Lauderdale, FL)
“Daring and uncommonly beautiful literary flights of fancy. There are touches of Italo Calvino, Roald Dahl, and Gabriel García Márquez in them. At the same time, Tabloid Dreams couldn’t be more American in premise, flavor and humor . . . [it] makes its dozen fanciful tales not just real to its readers, but also sublimely reasonable.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“A hugely entertaining, sometimes dazzling collection from one of our most versatile writers.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“There’s a beautiful liquidity both to Butler’s prose and to his imagination. Sex and death hold hands and dance in Tabloid Dreams. . . . And yet these aren’t sad stories. They’re too funny for that. And in almost every one, there’s a moment of transcendence; for every character, redemption glimmers.” —Wisconsin State Journal
“Butler has taken a ham’s material and fashioned it into a dozen artful and wondrous tales, once again proving himself to be the rarest kind of writer, one who can’t be pigeonholed, who doesn’t rely on a set, safe shtick but keeps challenging himself with new and varied material.” —Chicago Tribune
“Every story in this collection deserves a prize. Originality, humor, distinctive voices, drop-dead prose—Butler possesses all these qualities, and he lends them to every story.” —The Hudson Review
“Butler has a remarkable facility for finding the heart in otherwise trashy lives. . . . In trash, suggests Butler, there can always be transcendence.” —The Village Voice
“Tabloid Dreams is full-blown American magical realism: funny, lyrical, striking, its stories seek and find meaning in our very own myths, the ones we characteristically reinvent every few years to fit our fears and fantasies . . . Butler and his characters convince us that concepts such as conscience, justice, and love are meaningful and necessary, even in a culture whose stock-in-trade is bunk.” —Boston Book Review
Robert Olen Butler has published nineteen novels and six volumes of short stories, one of which, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2014 he was the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award and he has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction. He has also been a Guggenheim Fellow. Butler’s works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, and Greek. His book on the creative process, From Where You Dream is widely used in creative writing classes. Butler is a Krafft Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University.
Prologue: Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot
I never can quite say as much as I know.
Once upon a time I looked at my fellow caged parrots and wondered if it was the same for them, if somebody was trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way. For instance, "Hello," I said, and I was sitting on my perch in the pet store in Tallahassee Florida and what I was really thinking was: Holy shit. It's you. And what was happening was I was looking at my wife.
"Hello," she said, and she came over to me and I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was. Those great brown eyes, almost as dark as the center of mine. And her nose—I didn't remember her for her nose but its beauty was clear to me at last. Her nose was a little too long, but it was redeemed by the faint hook to it.
She scratched the back of my neck.
Her touch made my tail flare. I felt the stretch and rustle of me back there. I bent my head to her and she whispered, "Pretty bird."
For a moment I thought she knew it was me.
But she didn't, of course.
I said "Hello" again.
I would quickly pick up ‘pretty bird.’ I could tell that as soon as she said it, but for the moment I could only give her another “Hello.” Her fingertips moved through my feathers and she seemed to know about birds. She knew that to pet a bird you didn't smooth its feathers down, you ruffled them.
But of course she’d done that in my human life, as well. It was all the same for her. Not that I was complaining, even to myself, at that moment in the pet shop when she found me like I presume she was supposed to. She said it again, "Pretty bird," and this brain that works like it does now could feel that tiny little voice of mine ready to shape itself around these sounds.
But before I could get them out of my beak there was this guy at my wife's shoulder wearing a rectal-red MAGA hat of all things and my feathers went slick flat like to make me small enough not to be seen and I backed away. The pupils of my eyes pinned and dilated and pinned again.
He circled around her.
A guy so unlike the one I’d been.
I could only woo with words. Well-chosen ones. Which had pleased her for a time. Till she decided she was of a different feather.
This guy was thick in the arms and gym-inflated enough to make my wife’s own budgie-plump body feel songbirdish to her. Something she needed. The kind of guy that—in retrospect—I saw her eyes move to more than once when I was alive.
A ‘hello’ wouldn't do and I’d recently learned ‘good night’ but it was the wrong suggestion altogether, so I said nothing and the guy circled her and he was looking at me with a smug little smile and I fluffed up all my feathers, made myself about twice as big, so big he'd see he couldn't mess with me. I waited for him to draw close enough for me to take off the tip of his finger.
But she intervened. Those nut-brown eyes were before me, and she said, "I want him."
And that's how I’ve ended up in my own house once again. She bought me a large black wrought-iron cage, very large, convinced by some young guy who clerked in the bird department and who took her aside and made his voice go much too soft when he was doing the selling job. The gym-rat boyfriend didn't like it. I didn't either. I'd missed a lot of chances to take a bite out of this clerk in my stay at the shop and I regretted that suddenly.
But I got my giant cage and I guess I'm happy enough about that. I can pace as much as I want. I can hang upside down. It's full of bird toys. That dangling thing over there with knots and strips of rawhide and a bell at the bottom needs a good thrashing a couple of times a day, and I'm the bird to do it. I look at the very dangle of it and the thing is rough, the rawhide and the knotted rope, and I get this restlessness back in my tail, a burning thrashing feeling, and it's like all the times when I was sure there was a man naked with my wife. Then I go to this thing that feels so familiar and I bite and bite and it's very good.
Citizen Parrot
Robert Olen Butler
“Originality, humor, distinctive voices, drop-dead prose—Butler possesses all these qualities”
—The Hudson Review
Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler (Tabloid Dreams) returns to form with this beautifully wrought, satiric journey from the Civil War to the political frenzy of 2024. Citizen Parrot is an absurd, touching, and redemptive allegory of personal and social unrest
Citizen Parrot
by Robert Olen Butler
ISBN: Trade paperback $18.95; Digital formats $9.99
Published: March 2027
Available Format(s): Trade paperback, Digital
He lost his voice. Then he gained wings. Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler returns with this beautifully wrought, satiric journey from the Civil War to the political frenzy of 2024.
It is a strange day when a man wakes up in the body of a barely verbal parrot. It is even stranger when the Parrot is promptly purchased by his ex-wife and brought to live in his own home with her new lover. But when his cage is left open, the Parrot soars into contemporary America—a land where everyone talks and no one listens.
From his mother who doesn’t recognize him, to a young girl who wants to adopt him, to a crow haunted by the Civil War, the Parrot collects words like ammunition in a world where discourse has gone mad.
Inspired by Butler’s acclaimed New Yorker story, Citizen Parrot is an absurd, touching, and redemptive allegory of personal and social unrest. Recalling the imaginative works of Cervantes, Twain, and Allende, this bold, picaresque journey takes us through the perils and promise of modern America.
Praise for Robert Olen Butler
“Out of pop culture, Robert Olen Butler extracts a result that looks uncomplicated, but subtly reveals many of the preoccupations of American literature—especially loneliness, conformity and innocence.”
—The Boston Globe
“Straightforward, surreal, hilarious, shocking and ultimately very moving. . . . It’s hard to imagine another writer who could achieve such pathos, humor and intensity from such an absurd situation. . . . Playwrights come first to mind: Ionesco and Beckett.”
—St. Petersburg Times
Praise for Tabloid Dreams
“It is Mr. Butler’s genius in this volume to lure an audience into the tent by shouting versions of the tabloids’ headlines—‘Every Man She Kisses Dies,’ ‘Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot’—and then providing more than the customer has been led to expect. Turning the lurid third-person titles of his stories into direct testimony from the principals, Mr. Butler often transforms the material’s coarseness—and a reader’s anticipated guffaws—into lyricism and wonder.”
—Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review
“To see, to know, to touch, to remember—these desires have always been at the heart of great fiction. They are here in abundance, along with the skewed and comic tenderness that is Butler’s greatest gift as a writer. You start to read these stories and laugh; then, sucker-punched, you see the sadness and sweetness in each one.”
—The Times-Picayune
“These stories are masterpieces of accessible complexity—jewels of poignancy molded from what is generally considered a slag heap of modern culture. Tabloid Dreams is a magnificent work of imagination, entertainment and humanity. “
—SunSentinel (Ft. Lauderdale, FL)
“Daring and uncommonly beautiful literary flights of fancy. There are touches of Italo Calvino, Roald Dahl, and Gabriel García Márquez in them. At the same time, Tabloid Dreams couldn’t be more American in premise, flavor and humor . . . [it] makes its dozen fanciful tales not just real to its readers, but also sublimely reasonable.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A hugely entertaining, sometimes dazzling collection from one of our most versatile writers.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“There’s a beautiful liquidity both to Butler’s prose and to his imagination. Sex and death hold hands and dance in Tabloid Dreams. . . . And yet these aren’t sad stories. They’re too funny for that. And in almost every one, there’s a moment of transcendence; for every character, redemption glimmers.”
—Wisconsin State Journal
“Butler has taken a ham’s material and fashioned it into a dozen artful and wondrous tales, once again proving himself to be the rarest kind of writer, one who can’t be pigeonholed, who doesn’t rely on a set, safe shtick but keeps challenging himself with new and varied material.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Every story in this collection deserves a prize. Originality, humor, distinctive voices, drop-dead prose—Butler possesses all these qualities, and he lends them to every story.”
—The Hudson Review
“Butler has a remarkable facility for finding the heart in otherwise trashy lives. . . . In trash, suggests Butler, there can always be transcendence.”
—The Village Voice
“Tabloid Dreams is full-blown American magical realism: funny, lyrical, striking, its stories seek and find meaning in our very own myths, the ones we characteristically reinvent every few years to fit our fears and fantasies . . . Butler and his characters convince us that concepts such as conscience, justice, and love are meaningful and necessary, even in a culture whose stock-in-trade is bunk.”
—Boston Book Review
Robert Olen Butler has published nineteen novels and six volumes of short stories, one of which, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2014 he was the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award and he has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction. He has also been a Guggenheim Fellow. Butler’s works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, and Greek. His book on the creative process, From Where You Dream is widely used in creative writing classes. Butler is a Krafft Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University.
Prologue: Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot
I never can quite say as much as I know.
Once upon a time I looked at my fellow caged parrots and wondered if it was the same for them, if somebody was trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way. For instance, "Hello," I said, and I was sitting on my perch in the pet store in Tallahassee Florida and what I was really thinking was: Holy shit. It's you. And what was happening was I was looking at my wife.
"Hello," she said, and she came over to me and I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was. Those great brown eyes, almost as dark as the center of mine. And her nose—I didn't remember her for her nose but its beauty was clear to me at last. Her nose was a little too long, but it was redeemed by the faint hook to it.
She scratched the back of my neck.
Her touch made my tail flare. I felt the stretch and rustle of me back there. I bent my head to her and she whispered, "Pretty bird."
For a moment I thought she knew it was me.
But she didn't, of course.
I said "Hello" again.
I would quickly pick up ‘pretty bird.’ I could tell that as soon as she said it, but for the moment I could only give her another “Hello.” Her fingertips moved through my feathers and she seemed to know about birds. She knew that to pet a bird you didn't smooth its feathers down, you ruffled them.
But of course she’d done that in my human life, as well. It was all the same for her. Not that I was complaining, even to myself, at that moment in the pet shop when she found me like I presume she was supposed to. She said it again, "Pretty bird," and this brain that works like it does now could feel that tiny little voice of mine ready to shape itself around these sounds.
But before I could get them out of my beak there was this guy at my wife's shoulder wearing a rectal-red MAGA hat of all things and my feathers went slick flat like to make me small enough not to be seen and I backed away. The pupils of my eyes pinned and dilated and pinned again.
He circled around her.
A guy so unlike the one I’d been.
I could only woo with words. Well-chosen ones. Which had pleased her for a time. Till she decided she was of a different feather.
This guy was thick in the arms and gym-inflated enough to make my wife’s own budgie-plump body feel songbirdish to her. Something she needed. The kind of guy that—in retrospect—I saw her eyes move to more than once when I was alive.
A ‘hello’ wouldn't do and I’d recently learned ‘good night’ but it was the wrong suggestion altogether, so I said nothing and the guy circled her and he was looking at me with a smug little smile and I fluffed up all my feathers, made myself about twice as big, so big he'd see he couldn't mess with me. I waited for him to draw close enough for me to take off the tip of his finger.
But she intervened. Those nut-brown eyes were before me, and she said, "I want him."
And that's how I’ve ended up in my own house once again. She bought me a large black wrought-iron cage, very large, convinced by some young guy who clerked in the bird department and who took her aside and made his voice go much too soft when he was doing the selling job. The gym-rat boyfriend didn't like it. I didn't either. I'd missed a lot of chances to take a bite out of this clerk in my stay at the shop and I regretted that suddenly.
But I got my giant cage and I guess I'm happy enough about that. I can pace as much as I want. I can hang upside down. It's full of bird toys. That dangling thing over there with knots and strips of rawhide and a bell at the bottom needs a good thrashing a couple of times a day, and I'm the bird to do it. I look at the very dangle of it and the thing is rough, the rawhide and the knotted rope, and I get this restlessness back in my tail, a burning thrashing feeling, and it's like all the times when I was sure there was a man naked with my wife. Then I go to this thing that feels so familiar and I bite and bite and it's very good.