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Don't Think

stories by Richard Burgin

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A dazzling collection of short stories from renowned writer Richard Burgin.

Five-time Pushcart Prize winner Richard Burgin’s stories have been praised by the New York Times Book Review as "eerily funny, dexterous, and too haunting to be easily forgotten," with "characters of such variety that no generalizations about them can apply." In Don’t Think, his ninth collection of short fiction, Burgin offers us his most daring and imaginatively varied work to date. The stories explore universal themes of love, family, and time, examining relationships and memory—both often troubled, fragmented, and...

A dazzling collection of short stories from renowned writer Richard Burgin.

Five-time Pushcart Prize winner Richard Burgin’s stories have been praised by the New York Times Book Review as "eerily funny, dexterous, and too haunting to be easily forgotten," with "characters of such variety that no generalizations about them can apply." In Don’t Think, his ninth collection of short fiction, Burgin offers us his most daring and imaginatively varied work to date. The stories explore universal themes of love, family, and time, examining relationships and memory—both often troubled, fragmented, and pieced back together only when shared between characters.
7v6
In the title story, written in propulsive, musical prose, a divorced father struggles to cling to reality through his searing love for his highly imaginative son, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. In "Of Course He Wanted to Be Remembered," two young women meet to commemorate the death of a former college professor with whom they were both unusually close—though in very different ways. In "V.I.N.," a charismatic drug dealer tries to gain control of a bizarre cult devoted to rethinking life’s meaning in relation to infinite time, while in "The Intruder," an elderly art dealer befriends a homeless young woman who has been sleeping in his basement.

Together, the nine stories in Don’t Think illuminate the astonishing fact of existence itself while justifying the Philadelphia Inquirer’s assessment that Burgin is one of America’s most distinctive storytellers.

Reviews

Reviews

In the best short-story collections, each successive story builds upon the previous, making the sum greater than the parts. Five-time Pushcart Prize winner Richard Burgin’s ninth short-story collection Don’t Think succeeds easily in that regard, with tight, thematic links between stories and an impressive tonal range that span from dark, depressing—even gross—to wildly humorous, subtle, and human.

Burgin writes crisp and intelligent dialogue and description, and he handles disconcerting situations with deadpan ease... His characters—alone, alienated, desolate, and desperate—come alive on the page.

Burgin is the poet laureate of loneliness and longing, writing economically, with humor and exquisite attention to interior monologues.

Richard Burgin continues to have his finger on the pulse of modern experience as do few others.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
5.5
x
8.5
Pages
184
ISBN
9781421419718
Table of Contents

Don't Think
Of Course He Wanted to Be Remembered
Uncle Ray
The Chill
The Offering
The House Visitor
V.I.N.
Olympia
The Intruder
Acknowledgments

Author Bio
Richard Burgin
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Richard Burgin

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...
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