The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Bausch, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780060196493
• ISBN10: 0060196491
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-16
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Few writers of the past quarter-century have so consistently surprised, startled, and delighted their readers as has the masterful Richard Bausch, whom the Washington Post Book World calls "a virtuoso of language and literary grace." His nine critically acclaimed novels have established him as one of the most important fiction writers of his generation, a visionary stylist with an acute eye for the minute detail that illuminates the deepest wells of human experience. Yet it is for his award-winning short fiction that Bausch is perhaps most admired. The Stories of Richard Bausch celebrates the work of a great American artist, 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.

Author Biography

Richard Bausch served in the Air Force from 1965 to 1969. He and his wife, Karen, were married in 1969 and have lived in Virginia since 1971; they have five children. After stints as a singer-songwriter and a stand-up comic, Bausch attended the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1974-75. He has taught creative writing at the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, Breadloaf, the University of the South, and elsewhere; currently he holds the Heritage Chair from the Writing Program at George Mason University. Bausch's novels include Hello to the Cannibals, The Last Good Time, Mr. Field's Daughter, and In the Night Season. His stories have appeared in numerous prize-winning anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, O'Henry, and Pushcart, and have won two National Magazine Awards -- one for the New Yorker and one for the Atlantic Monthly. He is the co-editor of the prestigious Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and the recipient of the Lila Wallace -- Reader's Digest Writer's Award and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Table of Contents

Preface	xiii
Nobody in Hollywood	1	(13)
Valor	14	(17)
Riches	31	(10)
Self Knowledge	41	(9)
Glass Meadow	50	(11)
Par	61	(24)
Someone to Watch Over Me	85	(18)
Fatality	103	(23)
The Voices from the Other Room	126	(13)
Two Altercations	139	(15)
1951	154	(2)
The Man Who Knew Belle Starr	156	(22)
What Feels Like the World	178	(6)
Ancient History	184	(29)
Contrition	213	(9)
Police Dreams	222	(16)
Wise Men at Their End	238	(13)
Wedlock	251	(10)
Old West	261	(21)
Design	282	(19)
The Fireman's Wife	301	(29)
Consolation	330	(14)
The Brace	344	(17)
The Eyes of Love	361
Luck	313	(68)
Equity	381	(7)
Letter to the Lady of the House	388	(13)
Aren't You Happy for Me?	401	(20)
Not Quite Final	421	(17)
Weather	438	(13)
High-Heeled Shoe	451
Tandolfo the Great	414	(72)
Evening	486	(15)
Billboard	501	(10)
The Person I Have Mostly Become	511	(15)
1900	526	(19)
"My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun"	545	(17)
The Weight	562
Accuracy	519	(77)
Unjust	596	(20)
Guatemala	616	(23)
The Last Day of Summer	639

Excerpts

The Stories of Richard Bausch

Nobody In Hollywood

I was pummeled as a teenager. For some reason I had the sort of face that asked to be punched. It seemed to me in those days that everybody wanted to take a turn. Something about the curve of my mouth, I guess. It made me look like I was being cute with people, smirking at them. I am what is called a late life child. My brother, Doke, is twenty years older and played semipro football. But by the time I came along, Doke was through as a ballplayer and my father had given up on ever seeing a son play pro. I was a month premature, and very, very tiny as a child. Dad named me Ignatius, after an uncle of his that I never knew. Of course I didn't take to sports, though I could run pretty fast (that comes with having a face people want to hit). I liked to read; I was the family bookworm. I'm four feet nine inches tall.

Doke married young, divorced young, and had a son, Doke Jr., that the wife took with her to Montana. But Doke missed the boy and went out there to be near him, and when I graduated from high school, he invited me for a visit. That's how I ended up in Montana in 1971. I'd gone to spend the summer with Doke, in a hunter's cabin up in the mountains. It was a little cottage, with a big stone hearth and knotty-pine paneling and color photos of the surrounding country. On the shelf above the hearth were some basketball trophies belonging to the guy who owned the place, a former college allstar now working as an ophthalmologist down in Dutton.

Doke taught me how to fly-fish. A fly rod had a lot of importance to Doke, as if being good with the thing was a key to the meaning of life or something. He had an image of himself, standing in sunlight, fly rod in hand. He was mystical about the enterprise, though he didn't really have much ability.

While I was staying with Doke, I met Hildie, my eventual ex-wife. She was a nurse in the hospital where Doke took me the night I met his new girlfriend, Samantha. I met Samantha about two hours before I met Hildie.

Samantha had come home to Montana from San Francisco, where she'd been with her crazy mother. Before I met her -- many days before -- Doke had talked about her, about how beautiful and sexy she was. According to Doke, I just wasn't going to believe my eyes. He'd met her in a bar he used to frequent after working construction all day in Dutton. She was only twenty-five. He told me all about her, day after day. We were drinking pretty heavy in the evenings, and he'd tell me about what she had gone through in her life.

"She's so beautiful to have to go through that stuff," he said, "suicide and insanity and abuse. A lot of abuse. She's part Indian. She's had hard times. Her father was a full-blooded Cherokee. She's a genius. He killed himself. Then her mother went crazy, and they put her in this institution for the insane over in San Francisco. Her mother doesn't know her own name anymore. Or Samantha's. Pathetic, really. Think about it. And she looks like a goddess. I can't even find the words for it. Beautiful. Nobody in the world. Not even Hollywood."

At the time, I was worried about getting drafted into the army and was under a lot of stress. They were drafting everybody back then, and I was worried. I didn't want to hear about Doke's beautiful girlfriend. "Man," he said, "I wish I had her picture -- a snapshot of her -- so I could show you. But the Indian blood means she has this thing about having her picture taken. Like it steals part of her soul. They all believe that."

He was talking about her the night she arrived, the traveling she'd done when she was a back-dancer for the Rolling Stones ("She knows Mick Jagger, man") and the heavy things she'd seen -- abused children and illicit drugs and alcohol -- and also the positions she liked during sex, and the various ways they had of doing it together.

"She's an Indian," he said. "They have all kinds of weird ways."

"Could we go out on the porch or something?" I said.

He hadn't heard me. "She wears a headband. It expresses her people. When she was six her mother went crazy the first time. A white woman, the mother, right? This poor girl from Connecticut with no idea what she was getting into, marrying this guy, coming out here to live, almost like a pioneer. Only the guy turned out to be a wild man. They lived on the reservation, and nobody else wanted anything to do with them because of how he was. A true primitive, but a noble one, too. You should hear Samantha talk about him. He used to take her everywhere, and he had this crazy thing about rock concerts. Like they were from the old days of the tribe, see. He'd go and dance and get really drunk. Samantha went with him until she was in her teens. She actually has a daughter from when they traveled with the Rolling Stones. The daughter's staying with her mother's sister back East. It's a hell of a story."

"She's only twenty-five?"

He nodded. "Had the daughter when she was seventeen."

"The Rolling Stones," I said. "Something."

"Don't give me that look," he said.

I smiled as big as I could ...

The Stories of Richard Bausch. Copyright © by Richard Bausch. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from The Stories of Richard Bausch by Richard Bausch
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