The Stories of Frederick Busch

A contemporary of Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff, Frederick Busch was one of our great American storytellers. Busch’s fiction is plainspoken; his subjects are single moments in so-called ordinary life. The stories in this volume, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, are tales of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, daughters and fathers. In “Ralph the Duck,” a security guard struggles to hang on to his marriage. In “Name the Name,” a traveling teacher attends to students outside the home, including his own son, locked in a county jail. In Busch’s work we are reminded that we have no idea what goes on behind closed doors or in the mind of another. In the words of Raymond Carver, “With astonishing felicity of detail, Busch presents us with a world where real things are at stake—and sometimes, as in the real world, everything is risked.”