A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Description
In these fifteen first-person stories, the Vietnam War’s aftershocks ripple through lives shaped by loss, survival, and the stubborn persistence of memory. Drawing on Vietnamese folklore and vivid oral storytelling, the collection brings Vietnamese voices to the foreground as characters navigate family bonds, cultural displacement, and the strange collisions between American pop culture and everyday reality. Across war-torn landscapes and intimate domestic scenes, Butler traces how trauma lingers—sometimes as haunting, sometimes as humor, sometimes as a hauntingly beautiful “good scent” rising from the most unlikely places. With his Pulitzer Prize–winning craft, Butler blends lyrical realism with mythic resonance to explore identity, resilience, and the ways stories become both refuge and reckoning.
Available Editions
paperback
Grove Press
Published Jan 1, 2001
269 pages
ISBN: 9780802137982
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Details
First Published
1993
Language
eng
Content Warnings
Content and trigger warnings for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler.