Richard Weston Burgin

Fear of Blue Skies, Richard Burgin's third collection of stories, explores the mysteries of love and memory, sex, revenge and redemption, family abuse, and forgiveness through an extraordinarily variegated cast of characters. In these pages one finds vivid renderings of prostitutes, artists, businessmen, the famous and the wealthy, the homeless and the tormented, as well as those who seek and find enlightenment.

In this collection of short fiction Richard Burgin's characters are everyday people at emotional and psychological crossroads. In the title story, a man who takes pleasure out of frightening strangers is forced to deal with his own fears.

"Set in the contemporary classical-music world of New York City and Tanglewood, the novel centers around the Faustian struggles of Ray Stoneson, a thirty-two-year-old composer, talented yet unrecognized. When Ray meets Perry Green, an internationally renowned, considerably older gay conductor and composer who is desperately attracted to him, both of their lives change inexorably. Perry offers to further Ray's career in exchange for a relationship; Ray eventually complies, but his secret sexual encounters with Perry threaten his relationship with Joy, the beautiful singer he longs to marry, and with Bobby, the idealistic but troubled young actor who is in love with Perry."--BOOK JACKET.

Five-time Pushcart Prize winner Richard Burgin’s stories have been praised by the New York Times Book Review as "eerily funny, dexterous, and too haunting to be easily forgotten," with "characters of such variety that no generalizations about them can apply." In Don’t Think, his ninth collection of short fiction, Burgin offers us his most daring and imaginatively varied work to date. The stories explore universal themes of love, family, and time, examining relationships and memory―both often troubled, fragmented, and pieced back together only when shared between characters. 7v6In the title story, written in propulsive, musical prose, a divorced father struggles to cling to reality through his searing love for his highly imaginative son, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. In "Of Course He Wanted to Be Remembered," two young women meet to commemorate the death of a former college professor with whom they were both unusually close―though in very different ways. In "V.I.N.," a charismatic drug dealer tries to gain control of a bizarre cult devoted to rethinking life’s meaning in relation to infinite time, while in "The Intruder," an elderly art dealer befriends a homeless young woman who has been sleeping in his basement.Together, the nine stories in Don’t Think illuminate the astonishing fact of existence itself while justifying the Philadelphia Inquirer’s assessment that Burgin is one of America’s most distinctive storytellers.

Jorge Luis Borges, one of the indisputably great writers of the twentieth century, was born in Buenos Aires in 1899. Never having been awarded the Nobel Prize, which his readers worldwide believed he deserved, this story writer, poet, essayist, and man of letters died at age eighty-six. This anthology of interviews with him features more than a dozen conversations that cover all phases of his life and work. He discusses his blindness, his family and childhood, early travels, literary friends, and struggles to find his literary identity. In depth he examines the meanings and intentions of his own famous stories and poems, and he speaks of the writers whose works he has loved - Dante, Cervantes, Emerson, Dickinson, H. G. Wells, Kafka, Stevenson, Kipling, Whitman, Frost, and Faulkner - and of those whom he disliked, such as Hemingway and Lorca. Borges expresses his contempt for Peron and assesses the tumultuous politics of Argentina. He speaks also of the imagination as a type of dreaming, about issues of collaboration and translation, about philosophy, and about time.