Wives & Lovers
Three Short Novels
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A first-rate collection of novellas that will break your heart and fill you with hope at the same time.” —Denver Rocky Mountain News
In the tradition of William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez comes Wives and Lovers, from the author the Boston Globe calls “One of the most expert and substantial of our writers.”
Requisite Kindness—published here for the first time—tells the story of a man who must comes to terms with a life of treating women badly when he goes to live with his sister and dying mother. Rare and Endangered Species demonstrates how a wife and mother’s suicide reverberates in the small community where she lives, and affects the lives of people who don’t even know her. Finally, Spirits is about the pain that men and women can—and do—inflict upon each other. Three very different stories that illuminate the unadorned core of love—not the showy, more celebrated sort, but what remains when the more ephemeral emotions such as lust, jealousy, and passion have been stripped away.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bausch strikes another blow against sloppy, maudlin sentimentality with this slim gathering of three razor-sharp novellas. Straightforward but deeply affecting, his work, as usual, adds up to much more than the sum of its parts, with bright glimmers of hope visible through the fog of loss and misunderstanding. In "Requisite Kindness," the volume's only new novella, a man who has "never felt any ease in the society of his own house" grapples with the repercussions of his whiskey-and-women past while keeping a solitary, snowed-in vigil at his dying mother's bedside. The strongest of the three is "Rare & Endangered Species," a dispiriting study of the myriad ways that "it feels like starvation to be intimate with someone you can't really reach," about the inexplicable suicide of a seemingly unflappable grandmother-to-be. "Spirits" traces a college professor's meltdown as he sits out a late-summer Virginia heat wave with a serial adulterer and a serial killer's ex-wife for companionship. Every action and conversation in these compact novellas is like a shaft of light refracted through a prism: Bausch is constantly turning and refocusing, closing in on the blinding-white clarity of each story's conclusion. fatigue, but it will reward the faithful.
