Spirits and Other Stories

by Richard Bausch

Offers a collection of nine short stories about people haunted by the memories of lovers, parents, and children lost forever

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

237 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

An acknowledged master of the short story form, Richard Bausch's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, Narrative, Gentleman's Quarterly. Playboy, The Southern Review, New Stories From the South, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize Stories; and they have been widely anthologized, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Vintage Book of the Contemporary American Short Story.

Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including the novels Rebel Powers, Violence, Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America And All The Ships At Sea, In The Night Season, Hello To The Cannibals, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace; and the story collections Spirits, The Fireman's Wife, Rare & Endangered Species, Someone To Watch Over Me, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers, and most recently released Something Is Out There. His novel The Last Good Time was made into a feature-length film.

He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the 2013 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence . He has been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers since 1996. In 1999 he signed on as co-editor, with RV Cassill, of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; since Cassill's passing in 2002, Bausch is the sole editor of that prestigious anthology. Richard Bausch teaches Creative Writing at Chapman University in Southern California

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Spirits' by Richard Bausch is a great collection by a master short story writer. Bausch mines the same territory as his contemporaries Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, who also people their stories with basically decent men whose lives are eroding due to failure and alcohol, but there is something about Bausch's take on this material that feels both more spiritual and closer to the bone. While every story here is well worth your attention, the book contains one of the most powerful stories I've ever read. 'Police Dreams' is the story of a man whose marriage and life are unraveling. At the same time, he is subject to terrible nightmares in which police break into his home and slaughter his family. Bausch moves back and forth between these two realities, building a suffocating sense of tension, until the story ends as it began in one of those terrible dreams––but this time the man takes action in his dream to defeat the horrible sense of helplessness that's been threatening to destroy him. The story concludes with one of the strongest last lines I've read in any story. It's a masterpiece, pure and simple.

[Jeff Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strongest stories: "The Man Who Knew Belle Starr" (clearly), and "Spirits," which appears not to have been published in a journal or magazine. Each story carries within it such a focused consistency, a persistent even-keeled sustaining confidence, that it carries the reader right through. Endings are hard.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The collected stories is the way to go with Richard Bausch, but this is my favorite collection. These stories are sometimes called bleak, but they're not--he loves his characters, and he understands that trouble is the place we live. Every story here matters and lingers.

[robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

i only read ancient history, which starts out too slow but is a worthwhile story.

[Kate Schmitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What Feels Like The World" is one of the best short stories ever written. Heartbreaking.