Children in the Woods

by Frederick Busch

"Powerful . . . Fiction of a very high order . . . Frederick Busch at his best."
-- Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[These] provocative tales center around relationships gone awry, families grappling with loss, and lonely men and women struggling with remnants of love . . . . What Busch ultimately serves is a heady and rewarding brew made up of people as real as ourselves, groping for and sometimes even discovering the comforts of love."
-- USA Today
"Memorable . . . [The] stories leap off the page with astonishing resilience and vigor. . . . Busch is a chronicler of domestic manners whose insights into family hierarchies transcend the factual to attain poetry and truth."
-- The Boston Globe

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Frederick Busch (1941–2006) was the recipient of many honors, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award, a National Jewish Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award. The prolific author of sixteen novels and six collections of short stories, Busch is renowned for his writing’s emotional nuance and minimal, plainspoken style. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he lived most of his life in upstate New York, where he worked for forty years as a professor at Colgate University.

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

20 years on, and “Ralph the Duck” still gives me chills. The rest is pretty much meh.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was written by my first college English professor. He had to give a required fiction survey and we all had to take it. After the course I collected a number of his novels. I think the course I took with him was either his first year on the faculty or his second but he remained there at Colgate University for the rest of his professional teaching life and apparently died in New York City some 30 years later. This book surprised me, it started slowly but I found the stories remarkably deep and remarkably varied. I didn’t know where they were going and the people seemed real enough and often troubled enough by anger or loss or just being lost that I found them as unexpected as real human beings. This is a great tribute to him. I remember the first thing he had us read that semester was Kafka’s “the hunger artist “, a short story that I breezed through. He spent an hour with the class of freshman, giving and taking,guiding and opening up an almost unbelievable richness of meaning and explication of a brilliant writer’s artistry.
I was stunned. At the end of the semester which was summer, in the days when summer was not school time for college students, he gave us a long mimeographed list of book titles. Some of them were contemporary and controversial, some of them dated back to the Victorian age. And I remember that he said to us “you are all going to have an excellent education here, and then you will leave and you will become readers. The challenge for you is whether you are going to be readers of unimportant unchallenging things or whether you are going to be serious readers who challenge yourself and accept the challenge of great literature.“ That course and his challenge changed my life. I only wish I had taken the time at some point before he died to let him know.

[Kathy Cowie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, there are some heartbreaking stories in this collection. In my opinion, Busch has the rare ability to write male and female characters equally well. Unlike most short story collections, these were all winners for me. The only reason it took so long for me to read it was that I could put it down (between stories), and I wanted it to last.

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very uneven. Some great stories here must not left me unmoved.

[Katie Lynn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't stick with it... I relearn all the time that I am not a short story lover.

[Laureen Vonnegut · Rating 3 out of 5]

some of the stories were a bit too 'soft' for me, but there were other ones that made up for it.