The subject of Frederick Busch’s extraordinary fiction, The Mutual Friend, is Charles Dickens. First published in 1978, Busch’s portrait of the Chief (or the Inimitable, as Dickens calls himself” was immediately hailed as a lively, accurate, an...
For twenty years now, Frederick Busch has been a relentless chronicler of the human heart. Except for an occasional foray abroad, he has tented to set his fiction in a physical territory … the North-East, upstate New York especially … which he ha...
A short but powerful tale weaving together moral complexity and romantic intrigue, Frederick Busch’s War Babies is the story of an American lawyer in his mid-thirties (Peter Santore) who travels to England in an attempt to tie up the loose ends ...
Here is that rarest and most satisfying of books: a grown-up love story. Harry and Catherine have been falling in and out of love for many years. She is divorced, determinedly raising two sons, and running a small gallery in upstate New York. He is a...
Closing Arguments is the story of a shocking murder trial, a disintegrating marriage, an obsessive love affair. Not a day goes by but Mark Brennan remembers Vietnam. In some ways he seems a textbook case of post-traumatic combat stress. Brennan carri...
"AM I YOUR MOTHER?" The headline screams out to Sarah from the pages of the personal ads. Suddenly seized with an "emergency feeling," she abandons her husband, Barrett, and their six-year-old son, Stephen, to search for her biological mother in rura...
"Powerful . . . Fiction of a very high order . . . Frederick Busch at his best."
-- Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[These] provocative tales center around relationships gone awry, families grappling with loss, and lonely men and women strugglin...
An immensely powerful story, The Night Inspector follows the extraordinary life of William Bartholomew, a maimed veteran of the Civil War, as he returns from the battlefields to New York City, bent on reversing his fortunes. It is there he meets Jess...
Not since Raymond Carver has the soul of the American family been plumbed as eloquently or as poignantly. The hungers of love and the fear of time drive the men and women, sons and daughters in these stories to speak. Frederick Busch renders precisel...
Psychologist Alexander Lescziak savors a life of quiet sophistication on Manhattan's Upper West Side, turning a blind eye to the past of his Polish émigré parents. Then a new patient declares that he is the doctor's half-brother, the product of a u...
The war in Iraq is present in some of these stories, and so are the domestic wars; and, in every case, a character seeks to comfort or to save someone. "The Rescue Mission" is narrated by a man who runs a rescue mission out of a trailer in upstate Ne...
A contemporary of Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff, Frederick Busch was a master craftsman of the form; his subjects were single-event moments in so-called ordinary life. The stories in this volume, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, are...
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 a master craftsman of the form; his subjects were single-event moments in so-called...