Boys who Do the Bop

These stories are rich in intimate glimpses into the inner worlds of quietly extraordinary people: a man who wants to give fatherly love to his girlfriend’s son; a farmer who regrets the loss of a great tree from her front lawn for her family’s satellite reception; an immigrant who tells his American wife the same two old family stories and only fixes two-stroke engines.

“THESE SURGICALLY PRECISE slices of intelligent life are distinguished by virtuosic phrase-making and fetchingly off-beat specifics.”
BRUCE ALLEN — The New York Times Book Review

“Mr. Rofihe can be surprisingly effective, with a quirky tenderness. Oddly touching, the interest here lies not in the stories’ mundane incidents, but in things barely hinted at: beneath this calm surface, powerful currents flow.”
BRUCE BAWER — The Wall Street Journal

“A gentle but insistent touch. . . . Rofihe pays close attention to how people talk about what they think and do.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Rick Rofihe’s stories have bulging motor nerves and threadlike muscles. They are contour almost without mass; lines of fierce magnetic energy with only a dusting of iron fillings to reveal their course. They are elusive, but not in the sense of escaping us. It is more as if we are unable to find them, and then they spring out at us; we are not sure from where.”
RICHARD EDER — The Los Angeles Times

Rick Rofihe was born in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1950 and has lived in New York City. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and his nonfiction in The New York Times. His first collection of stories, FATHER MUST, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A Whiting Award winner, he has taught fiction writing at Columbia University. He lives in Canada.