Description: His characters are masterfully illuminated by their interior narratives, which burst sharply into conversations at once intimate and calculated.
Brief description: Richard Burgin is the author of 11 previous books, including The Spirit Returns, Fear of Blue Skies, and the novel Ghost Quartet. Three of his books were named Notable Books of the Year by the Philadelphia Inquirer. Burgin recently won his fifth Pushcart Prize, and he has had 15 other stories listed by the Pushcart Prize anthology as being among the year's best in previous years. He is both founder and editor of the internationally distributed and award-winning literary journal Boulevard and a professor of communication and English at St. Louis University.
Review Quotes: Burgin, author of 11 books[including The Spirit Returns] and publisher of Boulevard, dwells on the violence, and the humor of misconnection in impressive detail . . . The title story, set at a Florida conference on beauty that grows increasingly more confessional and bizarre, concludes this astute exploration--touched with satire--of emotional vacancy and its attendant brutality.
--Publishers Weekly