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The Stories of Frederick Busch
A selection of short stories from a twentieth-century “American master� (Dan Cryer, Newsday).
A contemporary of Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff, Frederick Busch was one of our great American storytellers. Busch's fiction is plainspoken; his subjects are single moments in so-called ordinary life. The stories in this volume, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, are tales of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, daughters and fathers. In "Ralph the Duck," a security guard struggles to hang on to his marriage. In "Name the Name," a traveling teacher attends to students outside the home, including his own son, locked in a county jail. In Busch's work we are reminded that we have no idea what goes on behind closed doors or in the mind of another. In the words of Raymond Carver, "With astonishing felicity of detail, Busch presents us with a world where real things are at stake--and sometimes, as in the real world, everything is risked."
From his first volume, Hardwater Country (1974), to his most recent, Rescue Missions (2006), this volume selects thirty stories from an "American master" (Dan Cryer, Newsday), showcasing a body of work that is sure to shape American fiction for generations to come.
A contemporary of Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff, Frederick Busch was one of our great American storytellers. Busch's fiction is plainspoken; his subjects are single moments in so-called ordinary life. The stories in this volume, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, are tales of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, daughters and fathers. In "Ralph the Duck," a security guard struggles to hang on to his marriage. In "Name the Name," a traveling teacher attends to students outside the home, including his own son, locked in a county jail. In Busch's work we are reminded that we have no idea what goes on behind closed doors or in the mind of another. In the words of Raymond Carver, "With astonishing felicity of detail, Busch presents us with a world where real things are at stake--and sometimes, as in the real world, everything is risked."
From his first volume, Hardwater Country (1974), to his most recent, Rescue Missions (2006), this volume selects thirty stories from an "American master" (Dan Cryer, Newsday), showcasing a body of work that is sure to shape American fiction for generations to come.
- GenresShort Stories
512 pages, Hardcover
First published December 2, 2013
11 people are currently reading
79 people want to read
About the author
Frederick Busch
66books40followersFrederick Busch (1941�2006) was the recipient of many honors, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award, a National Jewish Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award. The prolific author of sixteen novels and six collections of short stories, Busch is renowned for his writing’s emotional nuance and minimal, plainspoken style. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he lived most of his life in upstate New York, where he worked for forty years as a professor at Colgate University.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 14, 2014
“Courage on the page mattered to this writer,� Elizabeth Strout says in her introduction. Frederick Busch was cruel to his characters. He liked to put them in God-awful situations, but never abandoned them there. Reading these stories, you feel the author suffering right along with his creations.
Busch joins authors as wildly different as Richard Russo and Joyce Carol Oates by setting most of his stories in hardscrabble upstate New York. The smell of wood smoke drifts through, and the weather’s often bitter. There are lots of big, foolish dogs, comically portrayed. “Ralph the Duck� opens with the main character carrying a heaving, garbage-eating golden retriever outside. “He loved what made him sick.� So too the college student in love with a heartless professor, whom he later rescues. Our hero’s own grief haunts the story without ever quite showing itself
Busch’s women often have been hurt and struggle with what to do next. The wrenching “The Joy of Cooking� is the story of a marriage hanging by the slenderest of threads. In the masterful “Name the Name�, the wife “isn’t local�. She can’t grasp this place she’s landed, where her husband’s job is to drive a battered pick-up to the homes of children who, for reasons inevitably dark, can’t come to school. In one house, he drinks coffee with a young mother. “She wore no socks, and the chapped rough redness of her ankles was an intimacy between us.� By the end, how much these two have in common is heart-breakingly clear.
Busch trusts his characters, who may lack stamina, but never endurance. He trusts his readers, too. He hooks us in, then gives us time to figure things out for ourselves. Bleak and tender in equal part, these are, to echo Strout, “stories for grown-ups.�
May 10, 2019
I don’t know why i had put off Frederick Busch, he’s a said inspiration for some of the top writers of the last 50 years. In this collection he feels like the Hemmingway of short (not so short) stories. The use of technical or detailed information with simplistic themes has a powerful effect.
September 12, 2016
Fantastic collection of stories; Frederick Busch is a master. I can't recommend this enough.
June 13, 2017
For some reason I had never read Frederick Busch. Glad I did. Felt like someone was talking to me from the past.
December 15, 2014
Frederick Busch wrote novels and short stories and was equally deft at both. More than any other writer, his short works display an amazing and staggering range of voices and predicaments for his characters. This is a superb collection of his very best.
December 17, 2024
The stories hit different than any other fiction. They have their own exquisite flavour and smooth drama in all of them. Frederick is definitely one of those writers, he's awesome; there is art in this type of fiction, which is hard to pull of without being pretentious but he does it in a marvellous way.
November 13, 2023
i would say i enjoyed about half of these stories. im not upset i read this book.
i can see why Busch is a contemporary of Carver -- but i didnt feel the pull i do to Carver's works.
i can see why Busch is a contemporary of Carver -- but i didnt feel the pull i do to Carver's works.
June 1, 2024
The Master of the Short Story
I was SO thrilled to find out in 2014 that a collection (a large one!) of Frederick Busch's short stories had just been published. I was not only a student of his at Colgate University but he was also my advisor. The first class I took with him was in the fall of my freshman year (1975, gulp). While I had a very solid base in literature for an incoming freshman, somehow the short story genre had been overlooked which would be considered unfortunate except that I had Professor Busch introduce me to them. He was passionate about Hemingway's short stories but like Ernest, Professor Busch wrote (or at least published) mostly novels and most in the years after I had graduated and although I have read most of the novels, I had only read a couple of his short stories. He died too young but I am so glad that his wonderful stories live on.
I was SO thrilled to find out in 2014 that a collection (a large one!) of Frederick Busch's short stories had just been published. I was not only a student of his at Colgate University but he was also my advisor. The first class I took with him was in the fall of my freshman year (1975, gulp). While I had a very solid base in literature for an incoming freshman, somehow the short story genre had been overlooked which would be considered unfortunate except that I had Professor Busch introduce me to them. He was passionate about Hemingway's short stories but like Ernest, Professor Busch wrote (or at least published) mostly novels and most in the years after I had graduated and although I have read most of the novels, I had only read a couple of his short stories. He died too young but I am so glad that his wonderful stories live on.
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October 29, 2020As of page 115, 4 stars
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Quotes
"honoring the possibilities that lie inside" - Strout, Intro
"responsible writing, a writing that is about the essential transaction between writer and reader. It is about being human in a time of despair" - Strout quoting Busch in Intro
"What to know about pain is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose." - Widow Water
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Quotes
"honoring the possibilities that lie inside" - Strout, Intro
"responsible writing, a writing that is about the essential transaction between writer and reader. It is about being human in a time of despair" - Strout quoting Busch in Intro
"What to know about pain is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose." - Widow Water
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
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