Absent Friends

Presents a varied collection of fourteen stories that range from a writer's attempt to come to terms with his past to the kidnapping of a doctor's estranged wife

These 14 stories represent a master of the genre writing with his customary power and eloquence. Busch, the recipient of several notable fiction awards, is the author of four previous short story collections ( Too Late American Boyhood Blues ), seven novels ( Invisible Mending ) and two volumes of criticism. Here, he explores a breathtaking range of the possibilities of short fiction. He writes of characters at risk, on the brink, or walking wounded. His situations are often bleak. In "From the New World," a man returns to his dead father's house where he must confront his hostile sister and the unknown con tents of his father's last letter addressed to him. In "Ralph the Duck," a Vietnam veteran heroically rescues a suicidal college girl. "People keep dreaming about the dead people they knew, see? You can't make people dream about you like that! It isn't fair!" he tells her. ("I want you to," she says. "I want you all to.") Busch's characters are vivid and real, and their sorrows are the knowable tragedies of real life. Raymond Carver's stories come to mind, but with this difference: where Carver's fiction is limned with flatness and voids, Busch's stories have resonance and depth.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

As its title suggests, this collection of 14 stories focuses on victims of separation. Busch documents the pain and loneliness created by divorce, imprisonment, death, increasing senility, and even terrorist kidnapping. While he identifies some immediate causes of estrangement, he also probes the more complex inner factors that prevent people from establishing or continuing relationships. Though somber, many stories contain comic ironies. A college student earns a D in persuasion and rhetoric but convinces another student not to commit suicide. A young girl in intensive care is given Keats's "When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be" as a homework assignment. An accomplished writer of fiction, Busch consistently provides lively, revealing dialogue and telling physical details in his description.
- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.