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Cover image of The Conference on Beautiful Moments
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The Conference on Beautiful Moments

Stories by Richard Burgin

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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...

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.

Reviews

Reviews

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.

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

Burgin skates along the edge of realism and dark fantasy in fiction so supremely well made that all manner of fancy and menace is readily ingested.

It takes a masterful writer to create characters who, regardless of whether they are likable, keep the reader engaged. Richard Burgin is such a writer.

It's not an astonishing claim to speak of Burgin's mastery of the short story form. His multiple Pushcart Prizes speak to this... Both in subject and form Burgin never seems to tell the same story twice... Burgin [is] at the top of his game.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
5.5
x
8.5
Pages
192
ISBN
9780801885198
Table of Contents

Jonathan and Lillian
The Second Floor
Vivan and Sid Break Up
Robert and His Wife
Mayor Bat
Uncle Simon and Gene
Cruise
Dates in Hell
Duck Pills
The Conference on Beautiful Moments

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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