Praise for
The Conference on Beautiful Moments
"Burgin skates along the edge of realism and dark
fantasy in fiction so supremely well made that all manner of fancy and menace is
readily ingested. Founder and editor of Boulevard, a professor, a
Pushcart Prize regular, and the author of a dozen books, including The
Identity Club (2005), Burgin is sophisticated, versatile and receptive to
the strange amalgams of voluntary and involuntary behavior that add up to our
polymorphous nature. Each short story in his sixth collection pairs
opposites and swerves in unpredictable directions. Sometimes disaster is
averted, as in the tricky, ultimately charming "Vivian and Sid Break
Up," or repressed, as in the masterfully creepy "The Second
Floor," a story about a young prostitute and a seemingly timid rich
man. In another, an aging and presumptive movie star seduces her wimpy
biographer and snubs her handsome butler. In another, a journalist
infiltrates a conference ostensibly concerned with aesthetics that has morphed
into something monstrous, a devolvement in keeping with Burgin's wily humor and
sure sense of the fine line between the absurd and the malignant, the droll and
the consequential." --ALA Booklist (January 1, 2007)
"Burgin is the poet laureate of loneliness and longing,
writing economically, with humor and exquisite attention to interior monologues.
. . ." --Philadelphia Inquirer (December 17, 2006)
"Burgin's compelling work examines loneliness. . . Taken
as a whole, Burgin does a superb job of chronicling an essential human need.
His protagonists may not be adept at connecting to fellow travelers in love or
family. To his credit, Burgin tells the stories that fill in the
gaps." --The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"It takes a masterful writer to create characters who,
regardless of whether they are likable, keep the reader engaged. Richard Burgin
is such a writer."—January Magazine
"It's not an astonishing claim to speak of Burgin's
mastery of the short story form. His multiple Pushcart Prizes speak to this . .
. Both in subject and form Burgin never seems to tell the same story twice . . .
Burgin [is] at the top of his game."—The Arkansas Review
"Richard Burgin’s voice is what takes you in. It can
be casual to the point of breeziness, but with an undertone of insinuation that,
like a street-corner whisper, at once draws you in deeper and warns you against
following; it treats you almost obsessively to detail while seeming to withhold
the one thing you need to know; it never loses its cheerful, dogged note even
when describing the absolutely horrific; it has a nugget of ice at its center.
It is, in short, the perfect instrument of urban anomie, and over the course of
several fiction collections and a novel, Ghost Quartet, it has carved out a
distinctive and unmistakable place in American letters. Burgin’s new
collection, The Conference on Beautiful Moments, represents him in peak
form."—Per Contra
"The Conference on Beautiful Moments contains some of
the best prose I've read in the last year, and while nearly every story is a
model of psychological realism and philosophical depth, a sizable percentage of
them also offer suspense of the praying-the-character-will-get-out-alive variety
. . . Burgin as a portraitist of conjugal love that is neither idealized nor
desperately bleak bears comparison with some of the literary-historical peaks in
relationship-realism, like, say, William Dean Howells and Alice Munro."—Chautuaqua
Literary Journal
"Burgin is always inventive and suspenseful, with tough
and truthful insights about the quest for identity, authenticity, connection and
commitment."—Chicago Tribune
"If his literary career ended today, Richard Burgin
would certainly be ranked in the top tier of American short story writers . . .
some of his best writing; for those already in the know, enjoy yet another
strong collection by a master practitioner of the short story."—The
Pedestal Magazine.com
"This is a work Chekhov could appreciate." - The
Review of Contemporary Fiction
Biography - Click here
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