What do Butler's A Small Hotel, Louv's The Nature Principle, and Abram's Becoming Animal have in common?
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Well, for one thing, the first two book titles made the list of Oprah's top 27 summer reads . The third, Becoming Animal, should have, but didn't. A Small Hotel, Robert Olen Butler's latest work of fiction, is an unapologetic romantic story of a couple in love for nearly 25 years but now in the throes of separation and divorce. (I first met Butler about six years ago at a Narrative Magazine fundraising dinner in Santa Fe, New Mexico.) Butler read from Intercourse , his 2008 collection of irreverant short stories that, through humerous paired dialogues, allow the reader to romp through imagined sexual moments of some very famous characters. It's a very "fleshy" book, but more about "connections" than separations, which is the theme of A Small Hotel. Richard Louv's latest book, The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature Deficit Disorder is also about separation (you'll have to look a little harder for the sexualit