The Children in the Woods: New and Selected Stories - Hardcover

Busch, Frederick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039564724X ISBN 13: 9780395647240

Publisher: Ticknor & Fields/Houghton Mifflin, 1994

Synopsis

The author of Absent Friends presents an unsettling anthology of stories, including "My Father, cont." in which a child fantasizes that he will be abandoned by his bickering parents, and other tales. National ad/promo.

About this title

About the Author

Frederick Busch is the Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University.

Reviews

Busch's magical, moving stories cut to the bone, revealing concealed fears, pains and hopes as he surveys the wreckage of fractured families, embattled marriages, ruptured lives. He proffers no neat endings, no assurances. A country doctor whose dog is stolen by a demented marijuana farmer finds himself in the middle of a drug bust ("The Page"). An enormously overweight man who discovers acceptance in the arms of his weekend lover must deal with her violent estranged husband ("The Trouble with Being Food"). Also a novelist ( Long Way from Home ), Busch exploits plot devices brilliantly, as in "Bring Your Friends to the Zoo," in which the contrast between the impersonality of the London Zoo and the heated break-up of an American and his married English lover create tension. Love of another sort fuels "Folk Tales," about a New York psychoanalyst who finds in his deceased mother's safety deposit box a letter he had written as an eight-year-old to Albert Einstein, along with the famed physicist's reply. In these 23 stories from the last two decades, the winner of the 1991 PEN/Malamud award for short fiction shows himself to be a master at exploring the human predicament.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Each of the stories in this elegantly crafted collection is well written and quietly moving. With compelling intimacy, the author brings to life a wide variety of characters. They are men and women at different stages of life: adult siblings dealing with the death of their parents, couples either separating or coming together, a child frightened by discord between his parents, a mother surprised by her son's adolescence and the passing of her own youth, a man rediscovering a piece of his childhood in a bank's safe-deposit box. The collection's title and its opening piece, "Bread," allude to "Hansel and Gretel." Indeed, the dark and frightening timbre of the Grimms' fairy tale and its theme of alienation run through all these stories. But, also as in the fairy tale, the main characters' experience of abandonment is eventually punctuated by a ray of hope, often in the form of an insight that brings the promise of healing. Anne Gendler

For readers unfamiliar with Busch's work, this collection of new and selected stories provides an excellent introduction. Older fans will appreciate having some of his best short fiction gathered in one place (at least 18 of the 23 stories have appeared previously in a variety of sources, beginning with the 1974 O. Henry Award winner, "Is Anyone Left This Time of Year?"). Long noted for his adroitness in adopting different personae to explore the vulnerabilities of human existence, Busch is a writer of style and power. As he points out, we are too often "puppets on the fingers of our arguments." This reviewer's favorite tale is "What You Might As Well Call Love," in which a father becomes vividly aware of the fragility of life as he imagines his son being swept away in a raging torrent. His fear and love are emotions we can all understand. It is not for nothing that Busch received the 1991 Pen Malamud Award for short fiction. This work is worthy of addition to even the smallest collections of literary fiction.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ticknor & Fields/Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039564724X
• ISBN 13: 9780395647240
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 338