3.5
Living in the Weather of the World
ByPublisher Description
In stories by turns suspenseful, comic, subtle, and profound, Richard Bausch probes the fault lines of daily life. At three in the morning a man tries not to wake his sleeping wife while fielding calls from his suicidal mistress. A successful real estate agent with two grown sons tries an online dating service on a whim and is surprised by the complicated result. And after being held up at gunpoint, a police officer commiserates with his assailant about their unhappy marriages. Wherever he casts his gaze, Bausch illuminates shades of human experience that defy understanding.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesLiving in the Weather of the World Reviews
3.5
“Enjoyed this collection of short stories and found it it be a pretty fast read— probably more like a 3.5.”
“Bausch’s flair in short fiction is very much still in evidence in this latest collection. Despite the false start of the first story “Walking Distance”, the rest of the stories sparkle with the wit and acerbic dialogue that his characters are best known for. That first story was an unpleasant surprise, given the abruptness of the action and the unrealistic turn of events and most surprisingly, the stilted dialogue. And breaking one of the cardinal rules of storytelling, “Chekhov’s Gun”, it literally featured a gun that failed to be fired.
Thankfully, Bausch recovers his form in the stories that follow, often featuring men and women attempting to establish some equilibrium in their lives but making unexpected connections with the least expected people. In “The Bridge to China”, a woman experiencing the empty nest syndrome, decides to try out an online dating service on her son’s casual advice, and finds out that instead of quelling her loneliness, she gains a kind of uneasy acceptance of her condition and even an ambivalent sympathy for her emotional date.
Elsewhere, in “We Belong Together”, “Unknown”,”Sympathy”, and “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire”, though they are hardly morality tales, adulterers and unfaithful lovers and their betrayed or spurned partners deal with the pangs of heartache and distress in variously comic, tragic and eventful situations.
An imaginative take on JFK’s assassination in “The Knoll” and the unlikely friendship between two soldiers on opposite sides in “Still Here, Still There” showcase Bausch’s nuanced perspectives on individuals whose personal dramas are no less than the macrocosmic events that they are caught up in.
Overall, like the title suggests, this highly enjoyable collection shows the different weather conditions one goes through in life, and that all you can do is to try to press on till the storm subsides, if it ever does.”
About Richard Bausch
Richard Bausch is the author of twelve novels and eight previous volumes of short stories. He is a recipient of the REA Award For The Short Story, the PEN/Malamud Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The Dayton Literary Peace Prize for his novel Peace. He is past Chancellor of The Fellowship of Southern Writers, and his work is widely anthologized, including in Pushcart Prize Stories, The O. Henry Awards, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from the South. He is on the Writing Faculty of Chapman University in Orange, California.
www.richardbausch.com
www.richardbausch.com
Other books by Richard Bausch
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