Now available in an elegant paperback, Robert Olen Butler’s 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 author’s imagination” (New York Times). Here are the imagined ultimate words of famous and invented figures—Medusa, Sir Walter Raleigh, Anne Boleyn, Jayne Mansfield, and a chicken, beheaded for Sunday dinner.