Rescue Missions: Stories

Author:   Frederick Busch
Publisher:   WW Norton & Co
ISBN:  

9780393062526


Pages:   304
Publication Date:   17 October 2006
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained


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Rescue Missions: Stories


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Overview

The war in Iraq is present in some of these stories, and so are the domestic wars; and, in every case, a character seeks to comfort or to save someone. \'The Rescue Mission\' is narrated by a man who runs a rescue mission out of a trailer in upstate New York. In his attempt to save a young woman from the brutality of her boyfriend, he is forced to confront the reality of his own mother\'s death. In \'Good to Go,\' an estranged couple try to save their grown son from the scars of war. Physical love, familial love, the need to give comfort -- and the need for comfort - are themes skillfully rendered by a master of the short story whose achievements have been acknowledged with the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit for lifetime achievement in the short story.  

Full Product Details

Author:   Frederick Busch
Publisher:   WW Norton & Co
Imprint:   WW Norton & Co
Dimensions:   Width: 14.90cm , Height: 2.60cm , Length: 21.70cm
Weight:   0.472kg
ISBN:  

9780393062526


ISBN 10:   039306252
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   17 October 2006
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Out of Print
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained

Table of Contents

Reviews

The missions of the title give a thematic unity to this dark collection of 15 stories from Busch (North, 2005, etc.), who died last February.Death haunts this collection. In I Am the News, two brothers, one thriving, the other facing ruin, meet after the death of their father, a proud former Marine. Though the successful brother and his father were ideological foes, he respects the Marine ethos and looks out for his kid brother. Another veteran figures in the far more effective Good to Go. Patrick, back from Iraq, has just bought a surplus army gun. Can his frantic parents wrest it away from this hard young man they no longer know? Metal Fatigue is another small gem. Harold is visiting daughter Linda in a mental hospital after her suicide attempt. Deranged, yet shockingly lucid, she uses another family tragedy, her grandfather's death, to browbeat her loving dad. That tight focus is missing from the off-key The Bottom of the Glass, in which an obese, interracial married couple travels to France to console a distant relative after her second husband's death. Passionate sex as an antidote to death (the point of One Last Time for Old Times' Sake ) is tiresomely delayed by talk about death during a lovers' final tryst, while in The Small Salvation, a middle-aged man's liberating sexual encounter with a kindergarten teacher is clouded by memories of his wife's death. In the title story, Edward is a staffer at a Rescue Mission. He knows all about abuse (his mother was killed by an abusive boyfriend) yet his attempt to help a doomed young woman is unavailing. And when, in The Hay Behind the House, compassionate Cara travels upstate from New York to save her parents from old age, it's her mother who saves her from rape.These stories reaffirm Busch's familiar vision of good deeds counting for little in a dangerous world. (Kirkus Reviews)


Author Information

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.

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