Bausch Richard

Alfonso Zamora is an aging Mexican senior tour player who has discovered he's going blind. Rita Shaugnessy is a lusty, hard-drinking, down-on-her-luck golfer on the women's pro tour. Billy Sprague is a country club pro with the most beautiful golf swing - except when there's money on the line. All three receive an invitation from Philip Bates, the richest man in the world and the founder of Macrodyne Software, to play in a mysterious golf tounament held on a never-before-seen course in Scotland. There the three will play in what will be the golf match of all time and upon whose results rests the fate of the world.

When Natasha, a lonely congressional aide in D. C., meets Michael Faulk, an Episcopalian priest struggling with his faith, the stars seem to align. The blossoming of their love, over the spring and summer of 2001, is intellectually gratifying and intensely passionate. A month before their wedding, Natasha is vacationing in Jamaica and Faulk is in New York when the terrorist attacks of September 11 shatter the innocence of the nation. Alone in a state of abject terror and convinced that Faulk is dead, Natasha endures a private trauma of her own: she is raped by a young man on the shores of the Caribbean. A few days later, she and Faulk are reunited, but the horror of that day, and Natasha's inability to speak of it, irrevocably create a schism in their relationship, between 'before' and 'after'. In beautifully wrought, deeply unsettling prose, Bausch plumbs the complexities of trauma and how we respond to it, in public and in private. Before, During, and After is an exquisite and excruciating dissection of intimacy, of the secrets we must keep even as they destroy us. An unforgettable tour de force from one of America's most distinguished and commanding storytellers.

A 2004 PEN/Malamud Award winner, this collection celebrates the work of American artist Richard Bausch -- 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.

The essential mystery at the heart of every relationship is the subject of these twelve stories. What drives people together? What drives them apart? Revenge, boredom, sex--they're all here. . . . The landscape of the heart depicted here is less bleak than it sounds; what drives these stories is the belief that love is reachable just around the bend. --Entertainment WeeklyRichard Bausch is a master of the intimate moment, of the ways we seek to make lasting connections to one another and to the world. Few writers evoke the complexities of love as subtly, and few capture the poignancy of the sudden insight or the rhythms of ordinary conversation with such delicacy and humor. To read these twelve stories--of love and loss, of families and strangers, of small moments and enormous epiphanies--is to be reminded again of the power of short fiction to thrill and move us, to make us laugh, or cry. In these profound glimpses into the private fears, joys, and sorrows of people we know, we find revealed a whole range of human experience, told with extraordinary force, clarity, and compassion.

Nora Michaelson and her eleven-year-old son, Jason. are going through a difficult adjustment to life after the accidental death of Jason's father. at a time when the family's small business was failing. The loss of Jack Michaelson has left his wife and son nearly destitute. It has also placed their lives in jeopardy. This is a story of terror, and resourcefulness in the face of terror, from a master storyteller.

The critics have been effusive in their praise for Richard Bausch's Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America and All the Ships at Sea. His hardover sales have also never been higher. Taking its title from Walter Winchell's famous radio salutation, Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America opens in Washington, DC, in 1964, just after the Kennedy assassination, telling the story of Walter Marshall, an idealistic 19-year-old who lives with his widowed mother and studies to be a journalist like his hero, Edward R. Murrow. In this coming-of-age novel in the truest sense of the phrase, young Marshall fumbles toward manhood in a nation that is itself in the midst of cataclysmic change. With the same elegance and precision that has distinguished his other novels, Richard Bausch has evoked a sense of time and place in a different America and brings the last 30 years of history profoundly and vividly to life.