Hide Island: A Novella and 10 Stories - Hardcover

"I can think of no one of his generation who reports the contemporary war between the sexes with more devastating wit and accuracy."--Philadelphia Inquirer "Every piece in Hide Island enhances the next with the attention to quality one has come to expect from a true master of the genre, and one of a very select few writers who, over time, has managed to stay consistently true to himself while advancing the art of fiction."--Prime Number, October 2013 "'You die of your life, ' one of Burgin's characters says with shattering simplicity. But another counsels, 'Courage, in the end, is all we have, it's even more important than our identity.' It's the essential truth that's wrung from Richard Burgin's deeply impressive fiction."--Broad Street Review, October 7, 2013 "A prolific writer of smart, literary fiction--particularly short stories of which he is an undisputed master."--Saint Louis Magazine, October 10, 2013 "Hide Island, Richard Burgin's sixteenth book and eighth collection of stories, is a brilliant offering, outstanding even in the context of his previous work, which has earned a well-deserved reputation for masterful, darkly comic forays into contemporary angst and the human condition. Insightful and lucid, Hide Island is remarkable for being at once accessible and profound."--PerContra, "A writer at once elegant and disturbing, Burgin is among our finest artists of love at its most desperate."--Chicago Tribune " . . . eerily funny . . . dexterous, too haunting to be easily forgotten."--New York Times Book Review

In Hide Island, his sixteenth book and eighth collection of stories, Richard Burgin explores themes of love and crime, memory and identity, abuse and redemption, and the contradictory battle between our fierce struggle to live lives worth remembering and our desire to disentangle ourselves from a past we wish to forget.The stories involve an extraordinarily variegated group of characters-ranging from doctors and drug dealers, prostitutes and businessmen, to writers and domestic workers. Hide Island gives voice to the profoundly tormented as well as those who seek and find enlightenment, justifying Joyce Carol Oates' praise in Newsweek's The Daily Beast that "What Edgar Allan Poe did for the psychotic soul, Richard Burgin does for the deeply neurotic who pass among us disguised as so seemingly `normal' we may mistake them for ourselves." And why the Boston Globe concluded that "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."