Friday, December 09, 2005

The Best Books I Read This Year, pt. 1

Bausch, Richard. Rare and Endangered Species: A Novella and Stories.

Sometimes I think Richard Bausch’s stories are like Raymond Carver’s if Carver only went deeper. Bausch’s stories are so truthful that they are by nature depressing. He manages to take situations that might otherwise be contrived or just trite and manages to draw what is richer from them. Like the back cover of the book suggests with mention of a “daughter’s announcement that she is marrying her sixty-three-year-old college professor,” or a “heartsick children’s clown,” these stories have the potential of being merely novel, but Bausch somehow knows the truth of the situations and goes beyond what a novice writer might make of them to find what the reader might understand about life.

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