RICHARD BAUSCH is the author of twelve novels and nine volumes of short stories. He is a recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for his novel Peace. He is past chancellor of The Fellowship of Southern Writers, and his work is widely anthologized, including in Pushcart Prize Stories, The O. Henry Awards, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from the South. He is on the Writing Faculty of Chapman University in Orange, California.
“Transporting and true . . . Chock-full of events both large and small, and issues both timely and timeless . . . Bausch holds us most rapt when he directs our attention to the vexingly wobbly line between authenticity and art.” —The New York Times Book Review “A masterful, lyrical satire . . . In many ways, Playhouse is a send-up of culture-making itself . . . Playhouse showcases both poetic description and double-edged dialogue. Any given paragraph can provoke a sigh, then a snort . . . This is domestic tension at its finest.” —Chapter16 “[Bausch is] an expert of dialogue . . . Often the discussions touch meaningfully upon King Lear, particularly those involving the actress who has removed her ailing father from a care facility against her stepmother’s wishes.”—The Wall Street Journal