A collection of essays from notable writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Bradbury, Andre Dubus, and many others, offers brilliant advice, wisdom, and insight to fiction writers about the art of writing and surviving the writing life. Reprint.

For twenty years now, Frederick Busch has been a relentless chronicler of the human heart. Except for an occasional foray abroad, he has tended to set his fiction in a physical territory--the Northeast, upstate New York especially--which he has given literary shape. With the capaciousness of a Dickens and the control of a Hemingway, Busch's novels have come in steady counterpoint, raising and answering by turns insistent questions that worry even the plainest of domestic lives. In this his fifth book of stories, the Absent Friends of the title are the lost characters the author has so compassionately detailed, who long to recover their absent selves. But they are also, as Richard Bausch comments in The Philadelphia Inquirer, "friends we have failed, or who have failed us; it is the emotional cost of that estrangement that interests Frederick Busch."

Peter Santore, the narrator, is an American lawyer in his mid-thirties come to England to track down a certain Hilary Pennels, the daughter of a Korean War hero who died in a POW camp, the same camp in which Peter's own father turned traitor and whose informing became, perhaps, the cause of Hilary's father's death. Only Hilary's guardian, Fox himself a survivor of the camp can explain, if he will, the troubling past that haunts the now fully grown "war babies." As Frederick Busch's relentless narrative bears down upon this complexity of betrayals, the lines between exploiter and exploited become eerily blurred.

"Powerful . . . Fiction of a very high order . . . Frederick Busch at his best." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review "[These] provocative tales center around relationships gone awry, families grappling with loss, and lonely men and women struggling with remnants of love . . . . What Busch ultimately serves is a heady and rewarding brew made up of people as real as ourselves, groping for and sometimes even discovering the comforts of love." -- USA Today "Memorable . . . [The] stories leap off the page with astonishing resilience and vigor. . . . Busch is a chronicler of domestic manners whose insights into family hierarchies transcend the factual to attain poetry and truth." -- The Boston Globe

After his parents separate, Petey leaves Brooklyn and moves with his father, an ex-cop, to a rural village in upstate New York, where his adolescent depression prompts him to play suicidal games with his father's pistol