Hide Island

The New York Times Review has praised Richard Burgin's stories as "eerily funny..dexterous...too haunting to be easily forgotten." Now in Hide Island, Burgin's 16th book and 8th collection of stories, he explores themes of love and crime, memory and identity, abuse and redemption, and the contradictory battle between our fierce struggle to live life worth remembering and our desire to disentangle ourselves form a past we wish to forget. The stories involve an extraordinary variegated group of characters--ranging from doctors and drug dealers, prostitutes and businessmen, to writers and domestic workers. In "Atlantis," two troubled lovers try to salvage their relationship by taking a trip to Atlantic City, the site of danger and decadence in their past. In "Hide Island," set near St. Petersburg, Florida, an aging former Professor describes his dead son's creative genius and their former idyllic relationship to his maid, who becomes increasingly anxious about her employer's behavior even as she empathizes with him. And in the novella "The Memory Center," set in the near future, a ruthlessly ambitious doctor seeks to surgically select his patients' memories in order to control them. Hide Island gives voice to the profoundly tormented as well as those who seek and find enlightenment.
Hide Island justifies Joyce Carol Oates praise in Newsweek's The Daily Beast that "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." And why the Boston Globe concluded that "Burgin's tales capture the strangeness of a world that is simultaneously frightening and reassuring, and in the contemporary American short story nothing quite resembles his singular voice."