Absent Friends - Hardcover

Busch, Frederick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394574265 ISBN 13: 9780394574264

Publisher: Knopf, 1989

Presents a varied collection of fourteen stories that range from a writer's attempt to come to terms with his past to the kidnapping of a doctor's estranged wife

About the Author:

Frederick Busch is the author of "Girls, The Children in the Woods, Harry & Catherine, "and" Closing Arguments. "

From Publishers Weekly:

These 14 stories represent a master of the genre writing with his customary power and eloquence. Busch, the recipient of several notable fiction awards, is the author of four previous short story collections ( Too Late American Boyhood Blues ), seven novels ( Invisible Mending ) and two volumes of criticism. Here, he explores a breathtaking range of the possibilities of short fiction. He writes of characters at risk, on the brink, or walking wounded. His situations are often bleak. In "From the New World," a man returns to his dead father's house where he must confront his hostile sister and the unknown con tents of his father's last letter addressed to him. In "Ralph the Duck," a Vietnam veteran heroically rescues a suicidal college girl. "People keep dreaming about the dead people they knew, see? You can't make people dream about you like that! It isn't fair!" he tells her. ("I want you to," she says. "I want you all to.") Busch's characters are vivid and real, and their sorrows are the knowable tragedies of real life. Raymond Carver's stories come to mind, but with this difference: where Carver's fiction is limned with flatness and voids, Busch's stories have resonance and depth.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0394574265
• ISBN 13: 9780394574264
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 278