Even as he maintained a full-time career writing such novels as Girls and War Babies, upstate New York's Frederick Busch (1941-2006) perfected his skills as a writer of bracingly honest short stories about the setbacks and the epiphanies of everyday life, winning the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction in 1991. For this anthology, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge has selected 30 of Busch's stories—culled from such collections as Absent Friends and Rescue Missions—among them "What You Might as Well Call Love," "The Settlement of Mars," "The Small Salvation," "The Ninth, in E Minor," and "Are We Pleasing You Tonight?" In "Ralph the Duck," a security guard struggles to hang on to his marriage, while in "Name the Name," a traveling teacher attends to students outside the school, including his own son, who is incarcerated.

"With astonishing felicity of detail, Busch presents us with a world where real things are at stake—and sometimes, as in the real world, everything is risked."—Raymond Carver

"You can count on Busch's prose to be startlingly revelatory, and the brilliance of his sentences endures even out of context.... This collection will make more people see Frederick Busch for the master he was, one whose talent for subtle impact was downright maximal."—NYTBR