Aside from six widely praised novels -- two of them nominated for the P.E.N./Faulkner Award -- Richard Bausch has written two collections of short fiction. Some of these stories first appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, and Esquire, and two were chosen for inclusion in Best American Short Stories of 1990. Asked in a 1990 interview in Publishers Weekly to expound on the relation between writing short stories and writing novels, Bausch replied that stories were "a form of profound recreation. Writing short stories satisfies me in a way that no other activity does. Novels are forms of profound commitment and obsession. There are so many waves, so many ebbings and flowing in them that I feel better to have finished writing a novel, whereas every stage of a story is fun to me. I began as a short-story writer; I wrote novels because I couldn't sell...