Someone to Watch Over Me: Stories By

By Richard Bausch

"The essential mystery at the heart of every relationship is the subject of these twelve stories. What drives people together? What drives them apart? Revenge, boredom, sex—they're all here. . . . The landscape of the heart depicted here is less bleak than it sounds; what drives these stories is the belief that love is reachable just around the bend." —Entertainment Weekly

Richard Bausch is a master of the intimate moment, of the ways we seek to make lasting connections to one another and to the world. Few writers evoke the complexities of love as subtly, and few capture the poignancy of the sudden insight or the rhythms of ordinary conversation with such delicacy and humor. To read these twelve stories—of love and loss, of families and strangers, of small moments and enormous epiphanies—is to be reminded again of the power of short fiction to thrill and move us, to make us laugh, or cry. In these profound glimpses into the private fears, joys, and sorrows of people we know, we find revealed a whole range of human experience, told with extraordinary force, clarity, and compassion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 17, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061881978

Richard Bausch

Richard Bausch is the author of nine other novels and seven volumes of short stories. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Playboy, GQ, Harper's Magazine, and other publications, and has been featured in numerous best-of collections, including the O. Henry Awards' Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. In 2004 he won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

Reviews for Someone to Watch Over Me

[natodok · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It takes a very skilled writer to spin such a fantastic story. If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel Star, just submit your story to [e-mail] or [e-mail]

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

At their best, the stories of Richard Bausch capture lives in extreme situations, which doesn’t always show people at their best but often scrapes away whatever masks we wear and reveals truths, beautiful or ugly. Of course an extreme situation need not be one of violence, though it is in “Valor,” “Fatality,” and “Two Altercations.” It might be a dinner at a fine restaurant celebrating a couple’s first anniversary, as in the title story, “Someone to Watch Over Me.” The latter situation becomes extreme if the ancillaries are just right, and in this case they most definitely are. This story is especially fascinating because our sympathies are almost entirely with one character through much of the story but then somehow begin to shift until by the end they are almost entirely with the other character. That’s a remarkable feat. But just one of many that arise in this fine collection.I’d like to say that every story here is exceptional, but of course even in a fine collection some will strike different readers as more exceptional than others. For me, apart from the title story, the two that stood out most were “Glass Meadow” and “Par.” The latter, in particular, has a very weak central character, deliberately so. You might suppose that might make the story collapse in upon itself. It doesn’t. Here Bausch takes his weak character through a kind of dark night of the soul (a recurring theme, perhaps). And the character emerges intact, altered surely but intact. I might have chosen “Nobody in Hollywood”, the final story in the collection, as my favourite. But that story (exceptional though it is) is so different from those that precede it that it almost feels like it should be in a different book. Or, perhaps a better way of looking at it, it suggests that there is much more to come from this writer, all of it well worth reading.

[chrisblocker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Often in short stories, it seems that plot is sacrificed for the sake of coming across as more "literary." Sometimes it is done well, and I can applaud the author; afterward, however, I remember nothing of the story (oh, that was the story where Sally woke up in the morning, put on her make-up and... uh...)

Bausch shatters this idea of the story-less story while remaining intelligent and relevant. Here are several stories that entertain the reader but do not compromise character development or theme.

Personal favorites in this collection include "Fatality," "Valor," "Two Altercations," and "Par."