The narrator of this story refers to Edith Wharton's 1911 novel Ethan Frome, which she says she was a few pages from completing the night that the Titanic sank. In the book, Frome, a poor New England farmer, finds himself attracted to the enchanting, captivating Mattie Silver, who is the cousin of his homely, ill wife, Zeena.

Butler's first short story collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Its fifteen stories, centered on the lives of Americans and immigrant Americans affected by the Vietnam War, force Vietnam folk myths up against the difficult realities of modern industrial life.

Readers can get advice from Butler about how to write in his From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction (2005), published by Atlantic Monthly Press.

Unlike the titles in Butler's short stories, the works discussed...