Big Bend

Immensely appealing . . . Roorbach's tender, affecting stories will leave you feeling as if you've come to understand your own missteps and misjudgments slightly better, and to forgive yourself a little more.

Roorbach is as raw and engaged a writer as you'll ever read . . . He rivals James Baldwin in his ability to miraculously open up rivers of male sentiment.

Here comes Bill Roorbach with nine good reasons to find the couch or some big chair. Reading these stories may be the reason we even have some of this furniture. Frankly, I recommend you take them into your house and meet these new people in Big Bend. They are as tender and troubled as we are, as charming, indecisive, nervous, blessed, crazy, and destined to survive, find love, miss it. I've been waiting for these stories for a while now.

Readers will gobble these beautifully wrought, affecting stories, wanting more. . . . Roorbach falls, for me, into that small category of writers whose every book I must read, then reread.

An exceptional collection. . . . The characters are like people overheard at the next table or behind you in a line—people you instinctively want to pull for. . . . A quirky, clever, ironic, sympathetic, satisfying group of stories.

Bill Roorbach's stylish writing—with its surprising and generous observations about landscapes, internal and external—makes for great literature. What a pleasure to read these sharp, funny, sexy stories.

Roorbach's ability to convey the unexpceted whims of luck and happenstance and irony make these stories, like the best told around firelight or on front porches, take up residence in the listener. He is a storyteller's storyteller.