SOURCE: Ewell, Barbara C. Review of Tabloid Dreams, by Robert Olen Butler. America 176, no. 17 (17 May 1997): 28.

In the following review, Ewell commends Butler's portrayal of unusual characters and absurd circumstances in Tabloid Dreams.

We depend on writers to show us the unreality of our lives. If they do their job right, they remind us how we always seem to be missing what is important in our efforts to be human. But when we live in a world as bizarre as contemporary America, with its hysterical machines and ironic facades, then the writer's work becomes a bit tricky. How do you expose unreality in a world devoted to counterfeit and substitution? How can you tell which is which? Robert Olen Butler is one writer who seems to thrive on the challenge.

In his first collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won a Pulitzer Prize...