Richard Bausch

During the winter of 1944, three soldiers are sent on a reconnaissance mission up a mountain in Italy, near Mount Cassino, led by seventy-year-old Angelo, an Italian of indeterminate loyalty, and are confronted by the terror, confusion, and hardship of their mission, which is enhanced by a life-altering encounter with a sniper, in a story of the human cost of war. 35,000 first printing.

Peace

Ronald Verlin Cassill

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.

The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction

Letter to the Lady of the House

Playhouse

"In these thirteen indelible stories, Richard Bausch once again proves himself a modern master. From the prize-winning novelist and universally acclaimed short story writer ("Richard Bausch is a master of the short story"--The New York Times Book Review), thirteen unforgettable tales that showcase his electrifying artistry. Bausch plumbs the depths of familial and marital estrangement, the violence of suicide and despair, the gulfs between friends and lovers, the complexities of divorce and infidelity, the fragility and impermanence of love. Wherever he casts his gaze, he illuminates the darkest corners of human experience with the bright light of wisdom and compassion, finding grace and redemption amidst sorrow and regret. Bausch's stories are simply extraordinary"--

"From the prize-winning novelist and universally acclaimed short story writer ("Richard Bausch is a master of the short story"--The New York Times Book Review), thirteen unforgettable tales that showcase his electrifying artistry. Bausch plumbs the depths of familial and marital estrangement, the violence of suicide and despair, the gulfs between friends and lovers, the complexities of divorce and infidelity, the fragility and impermanence of love. Wherever he casts his gaze, he illuminates the darkest corners of human experience with the bright light of wisdom and compassion, finding grace and redemption amidst sorrow and regret. Bausch's stories are simply extraordinary"--

Living in the weather of the world

Novel, A

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

What Feels Like the World

Tandolfo the Great

Gathered from approximately one hundred fifty writing workshops around the United States and Canada, this collection of short stories presents a variety of new voices, settings, and styles that capture all facets and visions of North American life.

Best New American Voices, 2008

Three American soldiers set out on the gruelling ascent of an Italian mountainside in the murky closing days of the Second World War. Haunted by their sergeant's cold-blooded murder of a young girl, and with only an old man of uncertain loyalties as their guide, they trudge on in a state of barely suppressed terror and confusion.

From the prize-winning fiction writer Richard Bausch (“A master of the novel as well as the story . . . Effortlessly engaging” —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times), a sharp, affecting, masterly new novel about a close-knit theater community in Memphis and one turbulent, transformative production of King Lear. As renovations begin at the Shakespeare Theater of Memphis, life for the core members of the company seems to be falling into disarray. Their trusted director has just retired, and theater manager Thaddeus Deerforth—staring down forty and sensing a rift growing slowly between himself and his wife, Gina—dreads the arrival of an imperious, inscrutable visiting director. Claudette, struggling to make ends meet as an actor and destabilized by family troubles, is getting frequent calls from her ex-boyfriend—and also the narcissistic, lecherous television actor who has been recruited to play King Lear in their fall production. Also invited to the cast is Malcolm Ruark, a disgraced TV anchor muddling through the fallout of a scandal involving his underaged niece—and suddenly in an even more precarious situation when the same niece, now eighteen, is cast to play Cordelia. As tensions onstage and off build toward a breaking point, the bonds among the intimately drawn characters are put to extraordinary tests—and the fate of the theater itself may even be on the line. Deftly weaving together the points of view of Thaddeus, Claudette, and Malcolm, and utterly original in its incorporation of Shakespeare’s timeless drama, Playhouse is an unforgettable story of men and women, human frailty, art, and redemption—a work of inimitable imaginative prowess by one of our most renowned storytellers.

A novel

Italy, near Cassino. The terrible winter of 1944. A dismal icy rain falls, unabated, for days. Three American soldiers set out on the gruelling ascent of a perilous Italian mountainside in the murky closing days of the Second World War. Haunted by their sergeant's cold-blooded murder of a young girl, and with only an old man of uncertain loyalties as their guide, they truge on in a state of barely suppressed terror and confusion. With snipers lying in wait for them, the men are confronted by agonizing moral choices... Taut and propulsive - Peace is a feat of economy, compression, and imagination, a tough and unmistakably contemporary meditation on the corrosiveness of violence, the human cost of war, and the redemptive power of mercy.

Spirits and Other Stories

Natasha, a lonely congressional aide, meets Michael Faulk, a priest struggling with his faith. Love blossoms over the spring and summer of 2001. A month before their wedding, Natasha is on a trip in Jamaica and Michael is in New York when the World Trade Center is attacked. That same day, Natasha endures a private trauma of her own: she is raped by a young man on the shores of the Caribbean. She and Michael are soon reunited, but the horror of that day, and Natasha's inability to speak of it, means that there will forever be a sharp line that divides their relationship into before and after.

Before, During, After

Richard Bausch's novels and short stories render the struggles of ordinary people through simple, direct language and a straightforward narrative style. His southern Catholic sensibility and his emphasis on spiritual crises and the nebulous nature of human connections have evoked comparisons to the writing of Flannery O'Connor.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. When Gordon goes on a drinking binge, loses his job, and sleeps with a teenage neighbor, Katherine attempts suicide, and Alex is the unfortunate witness to it all. In Take Me Back, Bausch has fashioned a harrowing examination of the hopelessness, despondency, and frailty families can engender. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

A Novel

Take Me Back

A decorated Air Force officer and former POW returns from Vietnam alive, but faces a dishonorable discharge and a two-year prison term

Rebel Powers

Contents: The man who knew Belle Starr; Police dreams; What feels like the world; Design; The eyes of love; The fireman's wife; Consolation; Letter to the lady of the house; Aren't you happy for me?; High-heeled shoe

The Selected Stories of Richard Bausch

To drink deep of the direction and sensibility of contemporary southern fiction, savor each dram in this delectable volume. Nineteen of the South’s most venerable writers—Madison Smartt Bell, Doris Betts, Fred Chappell, Ellen Douglas, Shelby Foote, George Garrett, Allan Gurganus, Barry Hannah, William Hoffman, Madison Jones, Michael Knight, William Henry Lewis, Jill McCorkle, Lewis Nordan, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Lee Smith, Elizabeth Spencer, Walter Sullivan, and Allen Wier—have selected a short work for inclusion here. All of the contributors are affiliated with the Fellowship of Southern Writers, organized in 1989 under the inspiration of the late Cleanth Brooks for the purpose of encouraging and honoring excellence in southern letters. Each piece in The Cry of an Occasion celebrates the distinctness of southern experience, giving expression in story form to a singular episode of mind, heart, or will. Varying from whimsical to ominous to sidesplitting to melancholy, the stories share a regard for the people who brush against us and in so doing shape us—generations of family especially, neighbors, as well as those occasional individuals who can mysteriously yet profoundly affect our lives. On a freezing December night, a woman returning home from a first date with a man finds herself locked out of her apartment; the pains he takes to help her surprise them both. A teenage girl suffers the day of her grandmother’s funeral attempting to be adult, furious with the pessimism of her mother and wounded by the absence of her father since she was three. A slave fleeing Mississippi in 1862 draws on the wisdom of breaking horses passed down from his grandfather to win assistance in his flight for freedom. Fourteen years after his teenage son’s death, a man realizes his mourning is incomplete despite therapy, relocation, and the outward signs of contentment. A pregnant woman has vivid dreams—of giving birth to a kitten, of -forgetting her baby on the hood of her car, and of concealing a joint in her bra—as she watches Boston’s changing seasons and struggles with her torturous enjoyment of smoking. “Now where will it all end?” asks one character. “All this pain and loving, mystery and loss. And it just goes on and on.” The occasion and expression of southern fiction are in hale and hardy form, and reading this exemplary collection is pure pleasure.

Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers

The Cry of An Occasion

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.Simply a delight to read--wise, probing, and sympathetic, and beautifully written. --Atlanta Journal-Constitution Bausch pulls the reader along in a prose that is as graceful as it is economical. He is one of our best writers. --Philadelphia Inquirer

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

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.

Richard Bausch

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