The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories

by Richard Burgin

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.

300 pages, Hardcover

First published October 5, 2005

About the author

Richard Burgin’s stories have won five Pushcart Prizes and been reprinted in numerous anthologies including The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, The Best American Mystery Stories, and New Jersey Noir (edited by Joyce Carol Oates). He is the author is 16 books including two novels, “Rivers Last Longer” and “Ghost Quartet,” eight collections of short fiction, as well as the interview books “Conversations with Jorge Louis Borges” and “Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer.” His book The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories was listed as one of The Best Books of 2006 by The Times Literary Supplement and as one of the 40 Best Books of Fiction of the last decade by The Huffington Post. Other books have been listed as Notable Books of the Year by The St. Louis Post Dispatch and three times by The Philadelphia Inquirer. In France a Richard Burgin reader, L’Ecume Des Flammes was published in 2011, which received a rave review in Le Monde. He is the founder and current editor of the literary magazine Boulevard.