The Children in the Woods

The Children in the Woods

Frederick Busch

#3253 of 8,085 books · #1601 in Fiction

Shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (1995).

The Children in the Woods won the 1991 PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story. Like Hansel and Gretel, the characters in The Children in the Woods are concerned with survival; in the subtle playing out of this dark fairy tale, Busch makes palpable the themes of love, loss, alienation, and disillusionment. In "Critics," it is the hierarchy of familial relationships that isolates an only child; in "The Settlement of Mars," a young boy's first recognition of the adult world is a frightening and disorienting experience; in "My Father, Cont.," a child fantasizes he will be abandoned by his bickering parents; and in "Folk Tales," a man's reappraisal of his life is catalyzed by the discovery of old correspondence in his mother's safe-deposit box after she dies. In all of these stories Busch is a master at exposing the vulnerability that resonates in each of the characters. The Children in the Woods is a distillation of twenty years of story collections by Frederick Busch. Containing eight previously uncollected stories, it is an opportunity for both old fans and those newly acquainted with his work to celebrate this remarkable writer.