Works

SOMETHING IS OUT THERE (2010). Bausch, an exceptional and prodigious fiction writer whose many accolades include the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction, follows his unforgettable war novel, Peace (2008), with a subtly powerful collection of new short stories, many about the unfathomable currents and riptides of matrimony. Marriages flounder before they’ve barely begun, as in “Immigration,” a taut tale of intensifying emotional confusion, and in the sweetly stressed “The Harp Department of Love,” a portrait of the tentative marriage between an emeritus music professor and his best former student. A capsizing marriage is the catalyst for friction among three brothers one hot summer in “Blood.” The hair-raising title story takes place during a blizzard in Virginia, as a woman who wants to leave her husband realizes that he has placed their family in danger. In the beautifully structured and complexly affecting “Byron the Lyron,” a gay man mourns the end of a 12-year relationship and worries about his ailing mother. Endlessly imaginative and empathic, Bausch continues the great American tradition of virtuosic short stories planted in the ordinary and catapulting into the inexplicable. –Booklist

PEACE, US (2008). Taut and propulsive – with its spare language, its punishing landscape, and the keenly drawn portraits of the three young soldiers at its center – Peace is a feat of economy, compression, and imagination, a brutal and unmistakably contemporary meditation on the corrosiveness of violence, the human cost of war, and the redemptive power of mercy.

PEACE, UNITED KINGDOM (2009).
Peace: reviewed by AL Kennedy, The Guardian.
Peace: reviewed by Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times.

THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF SHORT FICTION (2006). The classroom standard for readers and aspiring writers of fiction, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction offers the most comprehensive, engaging selection of classic and contemporary stories in the field.

THANKSGIVING NIGHT (2006). Some novelists are such gifted stylists and storytellers — with profound insight into the best and worst that resides deep inside the human heart — that a smaller person than I just might hate their guts. Okay, even a person my size might experience serious envy. Richard Bausch is such a writer. For a quarter-century now, in novels and short stories, he has turned a mirror on us and our next-door neighbors and shown us how real people live and laugh and cry.

WIVES & LOVERS: 3 SHORT NOVELS (2004). Bausch strikes another blow against sloppy, maudlin sentimentality with this slim gathering of three razor-sharp novellas. Straightforward but deeply affecting, his work, as usual, adds up to much more than the sum of its parts, with bright glimmers of hope visible through the fog of loss and misunderstanding.

THE STORIES OF RICHARD BAUSCH (2004). Bausch is a compelling storyteller whether he’s creating such richly layered novels as Hello to the Cannibals (2002) or his electrifying short stories. Notable for their structural perfection, convincing physicality, and psychological depth, Bausch’s masterful stories were showcased in a selected collection in 1996, and are now presented in a major retrospective volume containing 42 indelible tales.

HELLO TO THE CANNIBALS (2002). Two women. Two centuries. One novel. It’s an almost unthinkable challenge, but one that Richard Bausch (In the Night Season, Someone to Watch Over Me), commits to fully in Hello to the Cannibals. Bausch imagines a time-defying friendship emerging between Mary Kingsley, the famous Victorian explorer, and Lily Austin, a college dropout in the late 1980s who shows signs of having a promising future as a playwright.

SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME: STORIES (1999). Confused relations and the panic of loss suffuse the tales in Bausch’s stunning fifth collection of short fiction. All 12 stories here are full of domesticity, danger and people who sense disaster but, in a kind of dream-state impotence, can shout no warning. Fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, lovers and families watch their lives explode and unravel, and deceive themselves by believing they once had a grip on their realities.

IN THE NIGHT SEASON (1998). Nora Michaelson and her eleven-year-old son, Jason. are going through a difficult adjustment to life after the accidental death of Jason’s father. at a time when the family’s small business was failing. The loss of Jack Michaelson has left his wife and son nearly destitute. It has also placed their lives in jeopardy. This is a story of terror, and resourcefulness in the face of terror, from a master storyteller.

SELECTED STORIES OF RICHARD BAUSCH (1996). Richard Bausch is a master of the short story–and this selection brings together ten pieces which perfectly showcase his incisive wit, perception, and artistry. “He brings to life characters and situations as vivid and compelling as any in contemporary literature.” -Michael Dorris, The Washington Post Book World.

GOOD EVENING WITH MR. AND MRS. AMERICA, AND ALL THE SHIPS AT SEA (1996). With the same elegance and precision that has distinguished his other novels, Richard Bausch has evoked a sense of time and place in a different America and brings the last 30 years of history profoundly and vividly to life.

RARE & ENDANGERED SPECIES (1994). The winner of two National Magazine Awards for fiction, Richard Bausch has been hailed for the incisive wit and perception in his stories. Rare & Endangered Species, his new and brilliant collection, delves into the rhythms of American life, with all its complexity, humor, and passion. When his characters speak, we recognize their voices – whole lives open up within the frame of each unforgettable story.

REBEL POWERS (1993). In Bausch’s sixth novel, Thomas recalls the household he lived in as a young man and the events that changed his family forever. In 1967, trouble seems as distant as the trouble on the other side of the world–until Thomas’ father is dishonorably discharged from the Air Force and sentenced to two years at hard labor in a far-off federal prison.

VIOLENCE (1992). In this shattering novel, a man walks into a convenience store–which turns out to be precisely the wrong place at the wrong time. The near-death and seemingly arbitrary survival of Charles Connally are rendered with a realism, horror, and compassion that explore the strands of brutality running invisibly through his life, his wife’s–and perhaps, that of the entire nation.

THE FIREMAN’S WIFE, AND OTHER STORIES (1990). Richard Bausch gets deep inside of people’s lives. He speaks eloquently for and to all of us about the intricacies of relationships–their fragility and their inherent possibility for explosion.

MR. FIELD’S DAUGHTER (1989). The sensitivity to emotional nuances that Bausch’s work has always demonstrated . . . is again evident in this deeply felt novel that explores the ties between father and daughter.

SPIRITS, AND OTHER STORIES (1987). Bausch’s emerging reputation as a fine writer will rise with this moving collection. Precisely phrased, recounted in a variety of stingingly accurate voices, these nine stories all deal with the failure of the spirit, all, indeed, with aspects of a single personality.

THE LAST GOOD TIME (1984). Bausch reads like Rayomond Carver or Andre Dubus…a sublime orchestrator of his material.

TAKE ME BACK (1981). Take Me Back, Bausch’s second novel, set in a dingy apartment complex in fictional Point Royal, Virginia, explores the disaffected lives of Gordon Brinhart, an unsuccessful insurance salesman; his wife, Katherine, a former rock guitarist; and Katherine’s illegitimate son, Alex, a subdued eleven-year-old obsessed with baseball. In Take Me Back, Bausch has fashioned a harrowing examination of the hopelessness, despondency, and frailty families can engender.

REAL PRESENCE (1980). Richard Bausch has written a book distinguished by its distance from the customary first novel subject%u2026.Instead, he has written a perfectly wrought imaginative experience that comes to life at once, and stays alive throughout the entire extent of its telling.