Tabloid Dreams were spun from the titles of outlandish articles in supermarket tabloids. Had a Good Time builds its narratives around the images on vintage American picture postcards, which Butler has collected for more than a decade. One example is the tale "Mother in the Trenches", first published in Harper's in February 2003. It traces the journey of Mrs. Jack Gaines, a prosperous matron, from her comfortable home to the battlefields of World War I France, in order to convince her soldier son to come home; the story's basis is a period postcard that depicts a stout, middle-aged woman wearing dark clothes and a cloche hat. Again the critical response varied dramatically. The San Francisco Chronicle said that the stories "feel like a literary parlor game"; The Boston Globe called them full of "crisp writing, marvelous imagining, the discussion of large, existential questions that are as central to life now as they were a hundred years ago." Severance, Butler's 2006 collection of 240-word short stories about the post-beheading thoughts of decapitated people (from Nicole Brown Simpson to Louis XVI to Butler himself) was the basis of Severance, a one-act play by David Jette. It was produced in 2007 at McCadden Place Theatre in Los Angeles. At the time, Butler described Severance as his best and most ambitious book. This was the first of an extended venture into defining and exploring the short short story form. His companion collection, Intercourse, comprising 100 very short stories, revealed the inner monologues of couples (often famous) engaged in sexual intercourse. Weegee Stories, presenting the inner monologues of the subjects of 60 iconic photographs by Arthur "Weegee" Fellig, continued his interest in the form. He also published a theory of the short short story in Narrative Magazine. As further evidence of his predilection for self-reinvention, in 2009 Butler published Hell, a "roaring satire" of a novel set entirely in the underworld. Donna Seaman of Booklist, the American Library Association's magazine, called his 2011 novel A Small Hotel a "sexy novel of psychological suspense", adding, "Butler executes a plot twist of profound proportions in this gorgeously controlled, unnerving, and beautifully revealing tale of the consequences of emotional withholding." In still another act of reinvention, Butler published his first literary/historical/espionage/thriller, The Hot Country, with Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press in the fall of 2012. In 2001, Butler wrote in real time a complete short story, "This is Earl