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Severance by Robert Owen Butler (Paperback, 2008)

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Product Description : Now available in an elegant paperback Robert Olen Butlers acclaimed collection Severance depicts the final thoughts of people as they are losing their heads Celebrated as glorious Los Angeles Times these fascinating stories reveal the limitless will of the authors imagination New York Times Here are the imagined ultimate words of famous and invented figuresMedusa Sir Walter Raleigh Anne Boleyn Jayne Mansfield and a chicken beheaded for Sunday dinner

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Robert Owen Butler, Pulitzer-prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain , is one of the most inventive writers of our time. This book is inspired by the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated facts: first, that the human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and one-half minutes after decapitation, and second, that, in a heightened state of emotion, we speak at the rate of 160 words per minute.Based on this maths, he has written sixty-two stories, each exactly 240 words in length, giving voice to the flow of thoughts and feelings that go through a person's mind in the minute and a half after their head has been severed. The beheadings are both real and imagined - of characters ranging from Valeria Messalina, beheaded by her husband, Emperor Claudius I of Rome in 48AD, to Anne Boleyn beheaded by Henry VIII in 1536, to a chicken beheaded for Sunday dinner in Alabama in 1958, to the author himself, decapitated on the job in 2008. The final thoughts are not morbid or macabre, but are a way of looking back on a person's life and the world they inhabited. Each is told with the intensity of poetry and the wit of a great storyteller.