Rivers Last Longer: A Novel - Hardcover

Burgin, Mr. Richard

3.71

7 ratings by Goodreads

9781933896458: Rivers Last Longer: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1933896450 ISBN 13: 9781933896458

Publisher: Texas Review Press, 2010

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As teenagers in Brookline, Massachusetts, Barry and Elliot were best friends, sharing their passions for sports, music, movies, and girls, as well as their dreams of literary fame. Years later, when it appears Barry’s mother will inherit over a million dollars, the friends start planning a literary magazine to jumpstart their careers, only to bitterly fight once the inheritance finally arrives. For six years they don’t see or speak to each other. When they finally reunite in New York, Elliot is a struggling writer with a dead-end teaching job in Philadelphia, and Barry is a millionaire offering Elliot a free apartment where his deceased mother used to live. The friends decide to finally do the magazine they planned and seem ready to conquer the literary world, but Barry has a terrible secret and a terrifying double life that threatens to destroy not only their magazine but the woman they both fall in love with. At once a highly suspenseful psychological thriller and an ambitious literary work told from multiple points of view, Rivers Last Longer takes its turns, sometimes satirically, through the New York literary, art, and film worlds as it tells its story of friendship, ambition, murder, and love.

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About the Author:

RICHARD BURGIN is the author of twelve books, including a novel, Ghost Quartet, and six story collections. (A seventh is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.) His book The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories was listed by The Times Literary Supplement as one of the Best Books of 2006, and three of his other story collections were listed as Notable Books of the Year by The Philadelphia Inquirer. Five of his stories have won Pushcart Prizes, and others have been reprinted in The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction 2008, among numerous others. Burgin’s nonfiction books include Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges and Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer. He is the founder and editor of Boulevard, now in its 25th year of publication.

From Booklist:

In his second novel (after Ghost Quartet, 1999), Burgin, whose short stories have garnered five Pushcart Prizes and filled six hailed collections (e.g., The Conference on Beautiful Moments, 2007), embeds lashing observations on the state of literature within a hold-your-breath psychological thriller. Barry and Elliot were exceptionally close friends as teenagers in Brookline, Massachusetts, and beyond. Then they have a falling out over plans to start a literary magazine not unlike Boulevard, which Burgin founded and edits. Years later, Barry, now wealthy after his mother’s death, reconnects with gentle college professor and floundering writer Elliot, offering him the loan of a Manhattan apartment and reviving the magazine idea. But the seemingly suave Barry has a mad and evil secret life as a sexual predator. Burgin pushes his signature themes of alienation, diabolical relationships and obsession, artistic ambition gone malignant, and catastrophic delusions to new depths while simultaneously lamenting the fact that most fiction fails to tell the hard truth about the human condition. A compulsive and sardonic tale of the shadow side, where life, love, and art are savaged. --Donna Seaman

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