RICHARD BAUSCH is the author of twelve novels and eight volumes of short stories. He is a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Award, and the Literature Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, Playboy, GQ, Harper's Magazine, and other publications and has been featured in numerous best-of collections, including The O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from the South. He is a graduate of Iowa's MFA program and is currently a professor of English at Chapman University in Orange, California. From the Hardcover edition.