Don't Think

Richard Burgin's Don't Think is a superb book, a remarkable addition to his substantial, impressive oeuvre. The dark, sometimes bizarre, sensibility of his earlier work that once made Joyce Carol Oates compare him to Poe, remains, but it is joined in this volume with a more hopeful side. Together these joined forces make Burgin one of best and most eloquent writers of the American short story... Don't Think is another first-rate book on the shelf devoted to Richard Burgin's writing: works that have won him a reputation for masterful, darkly comic forays into contemporary angst and the human condition, ameliorated by acts of kindness and honest love. His is an extraordinary, invaluable voice in contemporary fiction. -- Miriam Kotzin Per Contra In the best short-story collections, each successive story builds upon the previous, making the sum greater than the parts. Five-time Pushcart Prize winner Richard Burgin's ninth short-story collection Don't Think succeeds easily in that regard, with tight, thematic links between stories and an impressive tonal range that span from dark, depressing-even gross-to wildly humorous, subtle, and human. Brooklyn Rail Burgin writes crisp and intelligent dialogue and description, and he handles disconcerting situations with deadpan ease... His characters-alone, alienated, desolate, and desperate-come alive on the page. Publishers Weekly Burgin is the poet laureate of loneliness and longing, writing economically, with humor and exquisite attention to interior monologues. Philadelphia Inquirer Richard Burgin continues to have his finger on the pulse of modern experience as do few others. Broad Street Review It's not surprising that Burgin has won five Pushcart Prizes for his short stories. St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Richard Burgin's stories, as this latest collection demonstrates, really aren't like anybody else's... Burgin has an uncanny knack for limning how the mind, its thoughts and memories and dreams, shapes experience and identity, and he does it in prose best described as soft-spoken lyricism. It is hardly going out on a limb to say that many of these stories will become classics and that someone someday will coin the adjective Burginesque." Philadelphia Inquirer Burgin gives the reader a lot of darkness, but when he peels it back, what comes into the light is central to what got us reading in the fi rst place, keeps us reading as we grow older, and requires us to have reading in our lives for them to feel complete. You can't really task a collection of short fi ction with more. Rain Taxi Review of Books Richard Burgin's Don't Think is a quiet masterpiece. It tells us that the bonds we form with people who we find or who find us are what create meaning in our lives, and the memories we carry constantly shape and revise our reality. American Microreviews and Interviews Savagely honest and deeply affecting, it ranks among Burgin's best. American Book Review