The Stories of Frederick Busch

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“Be brave,” Frederick Busch admonished aspiring writers in an interview he gave in 2003. “Keep your knees unbent.” Courage on the page mattered to this writer, and those reading through this collection of stories will find Busch’s writing to be relentlessly brave. “Love and serve your characters,” he said in the same interview. That will be found here, too, how he loved his characters and served them well. The undercurrent of tenderness toward these characters, combined with the daring presentation of them in their stripped down struggles, is what makes a Busch story its own inimitable experience to read. At the time of his death at the age of sixty-four, Frederick Busch had written twenty-seven books; seven of them were story collections. While he was a prize-winning novelist, the stories here have been chosen as a collection that represents the span of his life spent as a short story writer. This career began, he was to famously say, in the fourth grade when his stony-faced teacher suddenly smiled at him after he wrote a poem that pleased her. He claimed to have written steadily since then. But it would be a mistake to assume that Busch spent a lifetime as a writer in order for the world to smile upon him. These are not stories about a flowering dog wood tree, as his fourth grade poem had been. These stories are intended for the brave reader. These are stories for grown-ups.

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