Overview
Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler returns with this beautifully wrought, satiric journey from the Civil War to the political frenzy of 2024.“Originality, humor, distinctive voices, drop-dead prose—Butler possesses all these qualities”
—The Hudson Review
He lost his voice. Then he gained wings.
It is a strange day when a man wakes up in the body of a barely verbal parrot. It is even stranger when the Parrot is promptly purchased by his ex-wife and brought to live in his own home with her new lover. But when his cage is left open, the Parrot soars into contemporary America—a land where everyone talks and no one listens.
From his mother who doesn’t recognize him, to a young girl who wants to adopt him, to a crow haunted by the Civil War, the Parrot collects words like ammunition in a world where discourse has gone mad.
Inspired by Butler’s acclaimed New Yorker story, Citizen Parrot is an absurd, touching, and redemptive allegory of personal and social unrest. Recalling the imaginative works of Cervantes, Twain, and Allende, this bold, picaresque journey takes us through the perils and promise of modern America.
