Recipient of the 1991 PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, Frederick Busch confirms his achievement in this unsettling and affecting collection of new and selected stories. Like Hansel and Gretel, the characters in The Children in the Woods are concerned with survival; in the subtle playing out of this dark fairy tale, Busch makes palpable the themes of love, loss, alienation, and disillusionment.

In "Critics," it is the hierarchy of familial relationships that isolates an only child; in "The Settlement of Mars," a young boy's first recognition of the adult world is a frightening and disorienting experience; in "My Father, Cont.," a child fantasizes he will be abandoned by his bickering parents; and in "Folk Tales," a man's reappraisal of his life is catalyzed by the discovery of old correspondence in his mother's safe-deposit box after she dies.

In all of these stories Busch is a master at exposing the vulnerability that resonates in each of the characters. As Shelby Hearon proclaimed in the New York Times Book Review of Absent Friends, Busch's most recent collection, "These stories hit us where we live: alone.

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Busch's previous collections of stories and his highly acclaimed novels Closing Arguments and Long way from Home have established his reputation as a writer of powerful literary fiction. The distillation of twenty years of story collections by Frederick Busch, The Children in the Woods is further testimony to the integrity and distinction of his work.

Containing eight previously uncollected stories, The Children in the Woods is an opportunity for both old fans and those newly acquainted with his work to celebrate this remarkable writer.