Richard Bausch Books In Order

Violence

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. Author reading tour. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Rebel Powers

A decorated Air Force officer and former POW returns from Vietnam alive but faces a dishonorable discharge and a two year prison term. By the author of Violence. National Tour.

Good Evening Mr and Mrs America, and All the Ships at Sea

The critics have been effusive in their praise for Richard Bausch’s Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America and All the Ships at Sea. His hardover sales have also never been higher. Taking its title from Walter Winchell’s famous radio salutation, Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America opens in Washington, DC, in 1964, just after the Kennedy assassination, telling the story of Walter Marshall, an idealistic 19 year old who lives with his widowed mother and studies to be a journalist like his hero, Edward R. Murrow. In this coming of age novel in the truest sense of the phrase, young Marshall fumbles toward manhood in a nation that is itself in the midst of cataclysmic change.

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.

In the Night Season

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.

Hello to the Cannibals

‘My heart stopped peacefully, its beating grew slow and weak, and then just stopped. I died young. There is, really, only a little to tell.’And so ended, in 1900, the short but remarkable life of explorer and writer Mary Henrietta Kingsley, most of which was spent caring for her ailing mother, and attending to the business of her world wandering father. But the moment she was unencumbered, she set out on her own journey of discovery. Blithely ignoring the narrowly circumscribed roles and rules for a young woman of her day, she traveled alone to West Africa, and went to places no European had ever been.’Oh, silent friend, if you ever come to read this…
I am in Africa. Soon I will be walking inland, heading to places unknown.’It is almost a hundred years later, on her fourteenth birthday, that Lily Austin first hears the name of Mary Kingsley, the only female face in a book full of male adventurers. That night, as an ice storm rages outside, something awful and unexpected befalls Lily; and this is why, as she matures into a young woman, it is to the writings of Kingsley that she returns again and again for solace and comfort which she finds, especially, in a secret cache of intimate letters Kingsley wrote to an unnamed woman in the distant future. Lily, the child of professional actors, begins to write a play about Kingsley.’When they buried me at sea, off the coast of South Africa, the strangest thing happened. My coffin wouldn’t sink. It floated away from the ship…
Imagine that. I was still sailing the seas, even in death. I was wandering away.’On the surface, Lily Austin’s life could not be more different from Mary Kingsley’s. And yet, working on the play, she finds in her subject’s wit and resourcefulness the inspiration the bravery she needs to navigate the complicated waters of intimacy and betrayal, kindness and love.A triumph of the imagination, Hello to the Cannibals is Richard Bausch’s most dazzling and beautifully crafted novel to date.

Thanksgiving Night

Will Butterfield can’t believe it. His 75 year old mother, Holly, is drunk and threatening to jump off the roof. Again.

Holly and Fiona, another elderly relative, won’t stop tormenting Will and his wife Elizabeth with their bizarre though often amusing antics. Between Will’s worries about his bookstore, The Heart’s Ease, and Elizabeth’s troublesome high school students, dealing with ‘the crazies’ has become just too much.

But then something unexpected happens Henry Ward, a neighborhood handyman, meets the two old women, and he, his daughter Alison, and grandchildren are drawn into the Butterfields’ lives in surprising ways. Both a comedy and a love story a first for Bausch Thanksgiving Night is about the real meaning of family, and one particular clan that has many reasons to be thankful.

Peace

From the prize winning novelist and world renowned short story writer, recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Academy Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, a powerful novel about war, trust, and salvation that begs to be read in a single sitting. Italy, near Cassino. The terrible winter of 1944. A dismal icy rain, continuing unabated for days. Guided by a seventy year old Italian man in rope soled shoes, three American soldiers are sent on a reconnaissance mission up the side of a steep hill that they discover, before very long, to be a mountain. And the old man’s indeterminate loyalties only add to the terror and confusion that engulf them on that mountain, where they are confronted with the horror of their own time and then set upon by a sniper. 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.

Wives and Lovers

Wives & Lovers is a collection of three short novels from the author whom the Boston Globe calls ‘one of the most expert and substantial of our writers.’

Requisite Kindness published here for the first time tells the story of a man who must come to terms with a life of treating women badly when he goes to live with his sister and dying mother. Rare & Endangered Species demonstrates how a wife and mother’s suicide reverberates in the small community where she lived, and affects the lives of people who don’t even know her. Finally, Spirits is about the pain that men and women can and do inflict upon each other. These three very different works illuminate the unadorned core of love not the showy, more celebrated sort but what remains when lust, jealousy, and passion have been stripped away.

The Selected Stories of Richard Bausch

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.

From the Hardcover edition.

Someone to Watch Over Me

Richard Bausch is a virtuoso of the intimate moment, of the ways human beings seek to make lasting connections to one another and to the world. Few writers evoke the complexities of love as subtly as he does, and few capture the poignancy of the sudden insight or the rhythms of ordinary conversation with such delicacy and humor. In Someone to Watch Over Me, Bausch presents a breathtaking series of stories, filled with the startlingly real insights only a writer of his ability can capture so poignantly. Many of these stories have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Esquire, and one was included in the anthology Best American Short Stories 1997. All are hallmarks of Bausch’s brilliance, peopled with engaging characters, filled with the rhythms of ordinary conversation, and sure to draw readers to them time and again.

The Putt at the End of the World

‘ Sex. Money. International terrorism. And, of course, the ultimate question: Can a compact backswing save the world? Now, in the tradition of Naked Came the Stranger and Naked Came the Manatee, a clubhouseful of acclaimed authors pass the baton or the six iron to create an ensemble tour de force of suspense, romance, and hilarity on the links. Golf is not a team sport. But who says fiction can’t be? Get ready. The gallery is hushed and the approach shot nears. The birdie has landed…
The Putt at the End of the World Fore? No, nine! That’s right. Nine literary grand masters each contribute a chapter and together bring you a full round robin of characters, not to mention a blistering drive of a story line that beats par with every page. Alfonzo Zamora is the venerable Mexican Senior player who’s just discovered he’s going blind. Billy Sprague is the country club pro with a swing as elegant as an eagle in flight except when money’s on the line. Rita Shaughnessy is the hard drinking, hard loving, hard luck golfer on the women’s pro tour. All three receive an invitation from multibillionaire Phillip Bates, founder of Macrodyne Software. To inaugurate his dazzling new course in Scotland, Bates is spending millions to host a tournament starring the superpro trio. The gala will welcome world leaders in the name of global peace and the universal language of golf. Launching Bates’s new, revolutionary computer operating system, the weekend volley will also attract a long scorecard of wild and unanticipated guests, including the world’s most elusive environmental terrorist, a Spanish caddie named Humpy who inspires bogeys, a caddish pro who can’t pass the Rorschach test, a sexy male female counterterrorist team who keep driving into traps of their own making, a certain naked golfer making a bid for his hole in one, and enough plastique to end the world as we know it…
. Will things get rough in the rough? Will the green run red? Where is the mysterious nineteenth hole? And in an apocalyptic final play that will determine the fate of the world, ecoterrorists will converge on the course for an explosive putt to end all putts. The ‘Good Walk’ has never been more fun!’

The Stories of Richard Bausch

A 2004 PEN/Malamud Award winner, this collection celebrates the work of American artist Richard Bausch a writer the New York Times calls ‘a master of the short story.’ By turns tender, raw, heartbreaking, and riotously funny, the many voices of this definitive forty two story collection seven of which appear here for the first time defy expectation, attest to Bausch’s remarkable range and versatility, and affirm his place alongside such acclaimed story writers as John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley.

Something Is Out There

From the prizewinning novelist and world renowned short story writer, the author of 2008’s universally acclaimed novel Peace A brilliant one act drama depicting the futility and moral complexity of combat The New York Times, eleven indelible new tales that showcase the electrifying artistry of a master. A husband confronts the power of youth and the inexorable truths of old age. A son sits by his mother s bedside determined to give her what she needs in her final days, even though doing so means breaking his own heart. A brief adulterous tryst illuminates the fragility of our most intimate relations. A young man returns in the face of crisis to the parents he once rejected. A divorced young woman dealing with slowly increasing despair develops an obsesion about a note that fell from the pocket of a man who came to eat in the caf where she works. A wife whose husband has been shot must weather a terrible snowstorm with her two sons, as well as a storm of doubt about the extent of his involvement in a crime. Richard Bausch s stories contend with transfixing themes: marital and familial estrangement, ways of trespass, the intractable mysteries and frights of daily life in these times, the uncertainty of knowledge and truth, the gulfs between friends and lovers, the frailty of even the most abiding love while underlining throughout the persistence of love, the obdurate forces that connect us. His consummate skill, penetrating wit, and unfailing emotional generosity are on glorious display in this fine new collection.

The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction

A bestseller from first publication, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction has been adopted in over 750 schools in its Fifth Edition. From the start, it has offered students the writer’s voice, pure and unencumbered by excessive editorial commentary. This new Sixth Shorter Edition continues to abide by R.V. Cassill’s initial plan: ‘to put together a very large group of stories that would, in detail and overall design, express both the living tradition of short fiction and the culture of which it is a part.’

Best News American Voices 2008

Critically acclaimed novelist and short story writer Richard Bausch continues the tradition of identifying the best young writers on the cusp of their careers in this year’s volume of Best New American Voices. Here are stories culled from hundreds of writing programs such as the Iowa Writers Workshop and Johns Hopkins and from summer conferences such as Sewanee and Bread Loaf as well as a complete list of contact information for these programs. This collection showcases tomorrow s literary stars: Julie Orringer, Adam Johnson, William Gay, David Benioff, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Maile Meloy, Amanda Davis, Jennifer Vanderbes, and John Murray are just some of the acclaimed authors whose early work has appeared in this series since its launch in 2000. The best new American voices are heard here first.