Reviews

"Burgin, author of 11 books[including The Spirit Returns] and publisher of Boulevard, dwells on the violence, and the humor of misconnection in impressive detail... The title story, set at a Florida conference on beauty that grows increasingly more confessional and bizarre, concludes this astute exploration—touched with satire—of emotional vacancy and its attendant brutality."

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

"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."

"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. "

"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."

"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."

"Burgin is always inventive and suspenseful, with tough and truthful insights about the quest for identity, authenticity, connection and commitment."

"Burgin's compelling work examines loneliness... Burgin does a superb job of chronicling an essential human need."

"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. "

"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 Conference on Beautiful Moments offers a negotiation—between reader and text, character and place, character and character—demonstrating that rather than a singular, breathtaking, life-changing moment, it is the process that contains the value, and sometimes the joy, of life."

"This is a work Chekhov could appreciate."

"Burgin has the wonderful audacity to write about the beauty in desperate characters and tough situations and the skill to make readers believe it but wish they didn't."

"Stunningly effective, containing some of the best stories of [Burgin's] accomplished career... Burgin, at the peak of his considerable powers here, demonstrates the eternal difference between testimony and art, confession and paradox, journalism and fiction, Mencken and Faulkner."

"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 punchline."