Hide Island: A Novella and 10 Stories - Softcover

Richard Burgin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1937875229 ISBN 13: 9781937875220

Publisher: Texas Review Press, 2013

Synopsis

In Hide Island, his sixteenth book and eighth collection of stories, Richard Burgin explores themes of love and crime, memory and identity, abuse and redemption, and the contradictory battle between our fierce struggle to live lives worth remembering and our desire to disentangle ourselves from a past we wish to forget.

The stories involve an extraordinarily variegated group of characters—ranging from doctors and drug dealers, prostitutes and businessmen, to writers and domestic workers. Hide Island gives voice to the profoundly tormented as well as those who seek and find enlightenment, justifying Joyce Carol Oates’ praise in Newsweek’s The Daily Beast that “What Edgar Allan Poe did for the psychotic soul, Richard Burgin does for the deeply neurotic who pass among us disguised as so seemingly ‘normal’ we may mistake them for ourselves.” And why the Boston Globe concluded that “Burgin’s tales capture the strangeness of a world that is simultaneously frightening and reassuring, and in the contemporary American short story nothing quite resembles his singular voice.”

About this title

Review:

" . . . eerily funny . . . dexterous, too haunting to be easily forgotten."--New York Times Book Review

"I can think of no one of his generation who reports the contemporary war between the sexes with more devastating wit and accuracy."--Philadelphia Inquirer

"A writer at once elegant and disturbing, Burgin is among our finest artists of love at its most desperate."--Chicago Tribune

About the Author:

Richard Burgin’s stories have won five Pushcart Prizes and been reprinted in numerous anthologies. A resident of St. Louis, Missouri, he is the author of sixteen books, including two novels, Rivers Last Longer and Ghost Quartet, eight collections of short fiction, as well as the interview books Conversations with Jorge Louis Borges and Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer.

About this edition

• Publisher: Texas Review Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1937875229
• ISBN 13: 9781937875220
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248