Hide Island: A Novella and Nine Stories

by Richard Burgin

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.”

"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."-PerContra

"...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 Magazine

248 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2013

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.

Reviews

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raw yet refined, edgy yet eloquent: masterpieces of short stories

Richard Burgin Possesses that rare gift to create a full novel in but a few pages; the idea, the arc, the denouement, the resolution are all intact, just so incredibly compressed and succinct that when the read finally takes a breath at the end of each of these beautifully sculpted stories that first aftershock is to utter ‘More, please.’
For those yet to become familiar with the author, Richard Burgin is a fiction writer, editor, composer, critic and teacher. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts he graduated from Brandeis University and received advanced degrees from Columbia in New York. HIDE ISLAND is his sixteenth book and eighth collection of stories. His other books include CONVERSTATIONS WITH JORGE LUIS BORGES, the first book-length series of interviews with Borges in English, which has been translated and published in eight foreign language editions and has become a standard reference book for the many scholarly and critical books that are published about Borges that have followed (Burgin conducted the interviews when he was only twenty years old), and CONVERSATIONS WITH ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER, which has been translated and published in six foreign language editions. Burgin has entered that realm of the top writers of the day and for those yet to meet him, this collection is as strong as could be anticipated.

Burgin’s themes embrace the human foibles that are magnified in the seemingly regular characters he creates until his language opens the windows to allow us to see the needs, the abuse, the little (and big!) crimes, the clash between memory and identity, and the desperation to find a balance in the life in which we are living, even if that means sacrificing who we really are for a person others want to see despite our shadowy past.

Burgin does not limit his stories to simply sordid characters: among his population are prostitutes, drug dealers, ex-strippers, businessmen, physicians, writers, ‘the help’, and places that become characters or parcels of past history come alive. And while he is dealing with themes that are dark, even bleak, the manner in which he relates his stories is so eloquently written that we are allowed to see that possible light in each character’s future that just may change the story were it to progress past the defining page of ending Burgin chooses – a technique rare with other writers, unique with Burgin.

10 stories and a novella: a fine introduction to novices, a richly rewarding encore for devotees.

Grady Harp.

[Nathan Leslie]

Richard Burgin’s Hide Island is another exceptional collection of stories from one of the masters of the form. The characters in this book are both soul-searching and raw, a fact that only makes these works of short fiction that much more effective. Even more than Burgin’s many previous works, Hide Island struck me as interested in painting a picture of contemporary American which we rarely see in fiction any longer. I admire Burgin’s rugged realism; here is an author unafraid to look beneath the glossy surface.

Hide Island is a masterpiece of dialogue. In so many stories within this collection the reader gains the pleasure of listening to real people talking—and talking of subjects which might make the reader exquisitely uncomfortable (sex, obsession, chemical reliance). Burgin dramatizes his stories; the reader not only reads these stories, she experiences them.

It is no surprise that Burgin is likewise a master of mood. Take “Reunion,” where the narrator returns to Brookline, Massachusetts only to run into a woman from deep within the bowels of his past. The story is compelling precisely because our protagonist gives us such a pained confessional, dredged up like a wrecked trawler from the bottom of his personal ocean. The story is beautifully rendered, beautifully agonizing.

“Escort” is almost Kafkaesque. The protagonist is accused by a stranger of encroaching on his “territory” at terminal three of an unnamed airport. Despite his protestations, the protagonist is shuttled out of the area by a thuggish escort, who it turns out, is likewise a pimp. The second half of the story takes a poignant sidestep into the relationship between the protagonist and the hired help.

Burgin’s characters ache with life. I recommend this collection highly—it is one of the best short story collections of 2013, precisely as a result of its unflinching look at the wreckage around us, the divine underbelly of America.

[Joe]

I review Richard Burgin’s Hide Island and Allan Gurganus’s Local Souls in the October 6, 2013 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In Burgin’s stories, no matter how despairing or desperate the character, there’s always a sense of life’s tragic-comic absurdity. As for Gurganus, the author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, says he’s "tried to write the funniest books possible about the worst things that can happen to people.”

Go to my blog: Have Words--Will Write 'Em

and then to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

--Joe

[William Hastings · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Burgin continues to prove that he is one of the finest short fiction writers working today. "Hide Island" has all the hallmarks that make Burgin's fiction so compelling: psychological depth, beautiful prose, and a power of reflection and thinking that is too often absent from today's fiction. As much a philosopher-in-fiction as he is a storyteller, Burgin's book is a tough look at how we face living in the 21st century.