A new collection of short stories examining the extraordinary shades of ordinary life, from the prize-winning fiction writer Richard Bausch (“A master of the short story" —The New York Times Book Review) In ten piercing new stories Richard Bausch fleshes out the rich inner worlds of his characters and plumbs the nuances of infidelity, loss, and profound loneliness. In “Donnaiolo,” a young divorcee moves back into her childhood home, with no plans other than to eat her parents’ food and smoke cigarettes in her room. In “Isolation,” a woman pines for her lover while quarantining from the COVID-19 pandemic with her husband, a situation that deteriorates when she learns her beloved has fallen gravely ill. In “Broken Home,” a Catholic school field trip takes a violent turn when the unsupervised altar boys discover an abandoned house in the woods. And in “The Widow’s Tale,” a recent widow attends a séance after her sister reports having reoccurring dreams about her late husband. Throughout The Fate of Others, Bausch illuminates the tender, comic, and profound facets of the human condition, affirming once again his status as a modern master of the short story form.
Author
An acknowledged master of the short story form, Richard Bausch's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, Narrative, Gentleman's Quarterly. Playboy, The Southern Review, New Stories From the South, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize Stories; and they have been widely anthologized, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Vintage Book of the Contemporary American Short Story. Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including the novels Rebel Powers, Violence, Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America And All The Ships At Sea, In The Night Season, Hello To The Cannibals, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace; and the story collections Spirits, The Fireman's Wife, Rare & Endangered Species, Someone To Watch Over Me, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers, and most recently released Something Is Out There. His novel The Last Good Time was made into a feature-length film. He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the 2013 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence . He has been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers since 1996. In 1999 he signed on as co-editor, with RV Cassill, of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; since Cassill's passing in 2002, Bausch is the sole editor of that prestigious anthology. Richard Bausch teaches Creative Writing at Chapman University in Southern California
