Shadow Traffic

The New York Times Book Review has praised Richard Burgin's stories as "eerily funny... dexterous... too haunting to be easily forgotten," while the Philadelphia Inquirer calls him "one of America's most distinctive storytellers... no one of his generation reports the contemporary war between the sexes with more devastating wit and accuracy." Now, in Shadow Traffic, his seventh collection of stories, five-time Pushcart Prize winner Richard Burgin gives us his most incisive, witty, and daring collection to date as he explores the mysteries of love and identity, ambition and crime, and our ceaseless, if ambivalent, quest for truth.

In "Memorial Day," an aging man at a public swimming pool recalls a brief but momentous affair he had with a young British woman in London thirty years ago and the paradoxical role his recently deceased father played in it. In the highly suspenseful "Memo and Oblivion," set in the near future in New York, two rival drug organizations engage in a dangerous battle for supremacy -- one promoting a pill that increases memory exponentially, the other a pill that dramatically eliminates memory. "The Interview" centers on a B-movie starlet married to a much older and more famous director and her tragic yet comic interview with an ambitious but conflicted young reporter.

Shadow Traffic justifies the New York Times' claim that Burgin offers "characters of such variety that no generalizations about them can apply" and why the Boston Globe concluded that "Burgin's tales capture the strangeness of a world that is simultaneously frightening and reassuring, and in the contemporary American short story nothing quite resembles his singular voice."

Praise for Richard Burgin

"Burgin writes crisp and intelligent dialogue and description, and he handles disconcerting situations with deadpan ease... His characters -- alone, alienated, desolate, and desperate -- come alive on the page." -- Publishers Weekly

"Burgin is the poet laureate of loneliness and longing, writing economically, with humor and exquisite attention to interior monologues." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

"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." -- Booklist

"A writer at once elegant and disturbing, Burgin is among our finest artists of love at its most desperate." -- Chicago Tribune

"Burgin, in these engaging, haunted stories of obsession and misplaced, misguided affection, offers the reader both comedy and pathos, as if God is a comedian and humans are the punch line." -- American Book Review

"Burgin's prose is invigorating. Bravely and imaginatively, he characterizes that feeling of being adrift in a consumer-driven society and is particularly astute and funny dealing with the male viewpoint." -- Review of Contemporary Fiction