Richard Burgin (writer)
| Richard Burgin | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, professor, editor |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | Contemporary |
| Genre | Fiction, Criticism |
| Literary movement | Meta-Realism |
| Notable works |
Debut Criticism: Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1968) Debut fiction: The Man with Missing Parts (1973) Debut Short Story CollectionMan Without Memory (1989) Debut Novel: Ghost Quartet(1999) |
| Website | |
| www |
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Richard Burgin is an American fiction writer, editor, composer, critic, and academic. He has published nineteen books, and from 1996 through 2013 was a professor of Communication and English at St. Louis University. He is also the founder and publisher of the internationally distributed award-winning literary magazine Boulevard, now in its 31st year of continuous publication.
Richard Burgin (born June 30, 1947), grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. His father (also named Richard Burgin), was the Concertmaster and Associate Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and his mother, Ruth Posselt, was a concert violinist- the first American born woman violinist to extensively tour Russia. Both his parents were child prodigies. His sister Diana is a professor, translator, and critic of Russian literature. Burgin went to Brandeis University where he received a B.A.. He later received a Master's with highest honors from Columbia University. His first published book was a collection of interviews he conducted with the Latin American writer, Jorge Luis Borges, while Burgin was still an undergraduate. Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969) was the first book-length series of interviews with Borges in English and has been translated and published in ten foreign language editions. A substantial part of the book was reprinted in Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interviews by Melville House in 2013.
In 1975 he was one of the founding editors of the New Boston Review, now Boston Review magazine. In 1985 he published Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer, which to date has been translated into eight foreign language editions. A major part appeared as a two-part cover story in the New York Times Magazine. His stories have received numerous prizes and awards, including five Pushcart Prizes. Among his nineteen published books, The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories and Songs (Ontario Review Press, 2005 which included a 20 song disc of music composed by Burgin) was listed by The Times Literary Supplement as one of the best books of 2006. The Huffington Post recently named it one of the 40 best books of fiction in the last decade. The title story of The Identity Club was reprinted in Best American Mystery Stories 2005 and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction (Harper Perennial, 2008) edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Writing in the Daily Beast/Newsweek, Joyce Carol Oates said, "What Edgar Allan Poe did for the psychotic soul, Richard Burgin does for the deeply neurotic who pass among us disguised as so seemingly 'normal,' we may mistake them for ourselves." In an interview published in the literary journal Pleiades, Burgin said, “My goal is and always has been to depict people as honestly as I know them, which means writing about their mistakes as well as their victories, their fear as well as their courage (the two are always mixed), their cruelty or selfishness as well as their kindness.” In another interview, with The Philadelphia Inquirer, he said, "One of the things I try to achieve in some of my short stories is a kind of novelistic density or weight. My stories tend to have a number of characters, a period of time going by, and character and thematic development."
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