Frederick Busch is a distinguished master of the short story in late-twentieth-century America, adding to the vitality of that literary form with his powerful, morally penetrating stories. Of Busch's twenty-three published books, four are nonfiction, thirteen are novels, and six are story collections. Although his novels are as successful and well-crafted as his stories, and perhaps better known, his command of the short-story form is many-faceted. Busch's stories, like his novels, explore the "domestic particulars" of family life with realism but with an often mythic dimensionality and a sense of the interplay between personal life and the larger world. He takes as one of his major motifs children lost in the woods, from the "Hansel and Gretel" fairy tale, and his fiction can often be seen as a literary advocacy for understanding the vulnerability of children.

The elder of two sons, Frederick Busch was born on 1 August 1941 in...