Background
Burgin, Richard Weston was born on June 30, 1947 in Brooklyn. Son of Richard and Ruth (Posselt) Burgin.
(In 20 stories (both new and selected from his four previo...)
In 20 stories (both new and selected from his four previous collections), Richard Burgin explores our quest for identity and love, truth and family, as well as darker themes of betrayal and crime. In The Identity Club we meet an extraordinarily variegated cast of characters, including prostitutes and businessmen, a famous young writer and a homeless basketball player, an ambitious but thwarted composer. There are love stories, murder stories, as well as stories of transcendence, both imagined and real. The 20 songs on the accompanying CD, while not directly related to the stories, express many of the same moods and emotions found in The Identity Club, from the darkly lyrical to the exultant.
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(Ghost Quartet is a stunning exploration of love and ambit...)
Ghost Quartet is a stunning exploration of love and ambition, sexual identity, and spiritual purpose. Set in the contemporary classical music world of New York 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. With relentless suspense and profound psychological insight, Ghost Quartet moves toward a surprising, ironic, and powerful conclusion. Ghost Quartet is a compelling novel of aspiration and moral compromise, a finely crafted exploration of the boundaries that preserve the psyche and the damage that results when those boundaries are breached.
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( Fear of Blue Skies, Richard Burgin's third collection o...)
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 extraor-dinarily variegated cast of characters. In these pages one finds vivid renderings of prostitutes, artists, and businessmen, the famous and wealthy and the homeless and tormented, as well as those who seek and find enlightenment. Fear of Blue Skies is Richard Burgin's most ambitious story collection to date, exploring the form and narrative structure of the story as well as the psyches of his protagonists and their sometimes searing, sometimes comic visions of the world. It confirms what Robert Taylor of the Boston Globe said of Private Fame: "Richard Burgin's tales capture the strangeness of a world that is simultaneously frightening and reassuring, and in the contemporary American short story nothing quite resembles his singular voice." Praise for Richard Burgin and his work: "Finely balanced fictions... Masterly... Private Fame offers a thrill ride for anyone willing to explore the dark alleyways of the modern American psyche." -- Philip Herter, Philadelphia Inquirer "Richard Burgin, who edits the estimable quarterly Boulevard, is emerging as one of our most original story-writers." -- Robert Phillips, Southern Review "The motley psyches in Mr. Burgin's gallery expose themselves in eerily funny monologues... But it is not their strangeness alone that fascinates, for strangeness generally fascinates only temporarily. Rather, it is the way they twist messages from a saner world to fit their peculiar neuroses. And this is why Mr. Burgin's stories are so dexterous. In them, he has paused near a border, shifting his weight nervously, sizing up the wild, surrealistic landscape that lies just a few paces ahead." -- Susan Spano Wells, New York Times Book Review
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( The Chicago Tribune has called Richard Burgin "among ou...)
The Chicago Tribune has called Richard Burgin "among our finest artists of love at its most desperate," a critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer dubbed him "one of America’s most distinctive storytellers... I can think of no one else of his generation who reports the contemporary war between the sexes with more devastating wit and accuracy." Through an extraordinarily vivid and variegated set of characters, The Conference on Beautiful Moments, Burgin’s sixth collection of stories, continues his daringly dark yet often humorous exploration of these themes, as well as our mysterious quest for truth, success, and identity. In the gently satiric "Jonathan and Lillian," a movie star throws a dinner party with very different meanings for her biographer, her butler and ex-lover, and herself. In "Cruise," an aging straight man befriends a young gay man. Together they meet on their cruise ship’s deck to confess to each other "the worst thing they have ever done." In the title story, a journalist sent to investigate a conference formerly devoted to discussing beauty in the arts discovers it has turned into something considerably more sinister. In The Conference on Beautiful Moments, Burgin writes with equal compassion and insight about the homeless and the wealthy, prostitutes and businessmen, an autistic child and an art forger. His characters are masterfully illuminated by their interior narratives, which burst sharply into conversations at once intimate and calculated.
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( As teenagers in Brookline, Massachusetts, Barry and Ell...)
As teenagers in Brookline, Massachusetts, Barry and Elliot were best friends, sharing their passions for sports, music, movies, and girls, as well as their dreams of literary fame. Years later, when it appears Barry’s mother will inherit over a million dollars, the friends start planning a literary magazine to jumpstart their careers, only to bitterly fight once the inheritance finally arrives. For six years they don’t see or speak to each other. When they finally reunite in New York, Elliot is a struggling writer with a dead-end teaching job in Philadelphia, and Barry is a millionaire offering Elliot a free apartment where his deceased mother used to live. The friends decide to finally do the magazine they planned and seem ready to conquer the literary world, but Barry has a terrible secret and a terrifying double life that threatens to destroy not only their magazine but the woman they both fall in love with. At once a highly suspenseful psychological thriller and an ambitious literary work told from multiple points of view, Rivers Last Longer takes its turns, sometimes satirically, through the New York literary, art, and film worlds as it tells its story of friendship, ambition, murder, and love.
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( She didn't have anything to say so she smiled as he sat...)
She didn't have anything to say so she smiled as he sat down. When he got settled she looked at him and the oddest thing happened. She couldn't see his face. She knew he was a man, but where his face was supposed to be, there was a blankness like a white sheaf of sky. -- from "Carbo's" The Spirit Returns is the fourth collection of original short fiction from Richard Burgin. His characters are everyday people at emotional and psychological crossroads. In "The Liar," a man opening up to a dinner companion is reminded of the emptiness of his own life when the promise of emotional intimacy unexpectedly goes unfulfilled. A couple on a date face their own gender prejudices, past disappointments, and sexual expectations in "Carbo's". In the title story, a man who takes an unusual pleasure out of frightening strangers is forced to deal with his own fears when he shares this pleasure with one of those strangers. These are flawed but genuine individuals, rooted in honesty and compassion, and the lines of their compelling stories trace journeys through insecurity, despair, and, ultimately, hope. Praise for Richard Burgin and his work: "Burgin has given expression to a chorus of alienated voices too haunting to be easily forgotten." -- New York Times Book Review "Richard Burgin's ingenious tales are disconcerting from the word go." -- Los Angeles Times "Richard Burgin's tales capture the strangeness of a world that is simultaneously frightening and reassuring, and in the contemporary American short story nothing quite resembles his singular voice." -- Boston Globe "One of the most stimulating practitioners of the short story form." -- Philadelphia Inquirer "Brilliant." -- Review of Contemporary Fiction "Compelling... poignant" -- Library Journal "There is a new warmth and depth here, a melancholy sweetness and an intensified longing for human connection." -- Houston Chronicle " Fear of Blue Skies has a powerful cumulative effect, like watching a movie with a slow beginning that you suddenly realize has mesmerized you." -- Chicago Tribune
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Burgin, Richard Weston was born on June 30, 1947 in Brooklyn. Son of Richard and Ruth (Posselt) Burgin.
Bachelor with honors, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, 1968. Master of Arts with highest honors, Columbia University, New York City, 1969. Master of Philosophy in Modern American Literature, Columbia University, New York City, 1980.
Instructor English Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, 1970-1974. Editor New York Arts Journal, New York City, 1975-1980. Associate professor Drexel University, Philadelphia, 1984-1996, St. Louis University, 1996—2003, professor communications and English, since 2003.
Visiting lecturer University California, Santa Barbara, 1981-1983.
( Fear of Blue Skies, Richard Burgin's third collection o...)
( The Chicago Tribune has called Richard Burgin "among ou...)
(In 20 stories (both new and selected from his four previo...)
( As teenagers in Brookline, Massachusetts, Barry and Ell...)
(Ghost Quartet is a stunning exploration of love and ambit...)
( She didn't have anything to say so she smiled as he sat...)
(Literary biography, memoirs)
(Isaac Singer Biography)
(First Paperback Edit)
Member National Book Critics Circuit, St. Louis Writers Guild.
Married Linda Kinnard Harris, September 7, 1991 (divorced). 1 child, Richard Daniel.