Richard Burgin

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For the Polish-American violinist,(1892–1981), see Richard Burgin

Richard Burgin is an American fiction writer, editor, composer, critic, and academic. He has published fifteen books, and since 1996 has been professor of Communication and English at St. Louis University.^[1] He is also the founder and editor of the internationally distributed award-winning literary magazine Boulevard, now in its 28th year of continuous publication.

Career

Richard Burgin grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts and received a B.A. from Brandeis 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 eight foreign language editions.^[2] Burgin later received a Master's with highest honors from Columbia University.

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, a major part of which appeared as a two-part cover story in the New York Times Magazine, and which today has been translated into six foreign language editions.

His stories have received numerous prizes and awards, including five Pushcart Prizes. Among his fourteen published books, The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories and Songs (Ontario Review Press, 2005) was listed by 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. 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.” ^[3] 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." ^[4]

As a critic, Burgin has published numerous essays and reviews in (among many others) The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Partisan Review, Chicago Review, and The Boston Globe, where he was a columnist for both the paper and The Globe Magazine.

Texas Review Press recently published Burgin’s novel Rivers Last Longer in November 2010. The anthology L'Ecume des Flammes, a Richard Burgin Reader, was published in February 2011 (in French) by 13e Note Editions.

Burgin founded the literary journal Boulevard in 1985 and currently serves as editor. In an interview for the book Creating Fiction: A Writer's Companion (Harcourt Brace, 1995) Burgin said, "At Boulevard we're open to different styles of writing. We try to be eclectic in the best sense of the word and to be mindful of Nabokov's dictum, "there's only one school, the school of talent"." In addition to Boulevard and Boston Review, Burgin was the founding editor of the New York Arts Journal. He has previously taught at Tufts University, Drexel University and the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Burgin has also composed six CDs, one of which was co-produced with Gloria Vanderbilt.

Books

Selected Works

• L'Ecume des Flammes (published in French by 13e Note Editions, 2011)

Novels

• Rivers Last Longer (2010)
• Ghost Quartet (l999)

Short Story Collections

• Shadow Traffic: Stories (2011)
• The Conference on Beautiful Moments (2007)
• The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories and Songs (2006)
• The Spirit Returns (2001)
• Fear of Blue Skies (l998)
• Private Fame (1991)
• Man Without Memory (1989)

Interviews

• Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations (Editor) (1998)
• Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer (1985)
• Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1969)

Collaborations

• Stories and Dream Boxes with art by Gloria Vanderbilt (2002)
• The Man With Missing Parts, a novella with J. M. Alonso (1973)

Prizes

• 1982 Pushcart Prize^[5]
• 1986 Pushcart Prize
• 1998 Pushcart Prize
• 2002 Pushcart Prize
• 2007 Pushcart Prize
• The Best of American Mystery Stories 2005^[6]

Periodicals

• founding editor of Boston Review, 1975
• founder of New York Arts Journal, 1975–1982
• founder and editor of Boulevard, 1985-

References

External links

• Richard Burgin Official Website
• Books by Richard Burgin on Amazon
• Boulevard Magazine Official Website