Can a gimmick transcend its gimmickry? As gimmicks go, Robert Olen Butler's is a nifty trick: the epigraphs for Severance inform us that a human head remains in a state of consciousness for one and a half minutes after decapitation, and that people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute in a "heightened state of emotion." Simple math means that the heads in each of Butler's 62 stories get exactly 240 words for their narratives — first-person, stream-of-consciousness glimpses of the lives they led.

We hear the dying thoughts of many of the (in)famous beheadings of history, from 40,000 BC to 2008: John the Baptist remembers with almost erotic passion the moment of Christ's baptism; Anne Boleyn, the miscarried baby boy who was her last chance to produce a male heir for Henry VIII; Marie Antoinette, her childhood in the royal palace at Vienna. Other heads have been forgotten by the march of time — a slave, a factory girl, a murdered farmer. But Butler gives the nod (so to speak) to more imaginative cases as well. Medusa gets a turn, as do both St. George and his vanquished dragon. We hear from a chicken killed for Sunday dinner, and the final piece depicts Butler's own decapitation in 2008 — "on the job," at a book signing.

It's Butler's artistry, though, that is the real attraction — the talking-heads shtick would otherwise lose its novelty after just a few stories — and by its end, the book becomes an intensely personal (if inherently speculative) tour of history and literature, rendered in urgent, splendid prose and steeped in pathos. In Butler's hands, his subjects' final thoughts turn most often to the joys of living, whether seminal moments of their biographies or intimate memories known only to a fictionist's pen. The beheaded have 90 seconds of rapture: a fleeting, liminal moment wherein corporeal life and ethereal death are bridged, paradoxically, through severance. When time runs out and their stories end, all that follows is a blank, black page.

-Chris Parris-Lamb