Robert Olen Butler served with the US Army in Vietnam as a Vietnamese linguist in 1971. He has published six novels since 1981, the most recent of which is The Deuce. The short stories in this collection have appeared in such places as The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded him the Emily Clark Balch Award. They have also been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. Robert Olen Butler teaches creative writing at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and is a 1993 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction.

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize.