In the following interview, Busch analyzes current critical theory and its effect on writers, discusses the inconvenience of being both a writer and a teacher, evaluates his education and its impact on his writing, and gives in-depth explanations about the inspirational sources for his works.

In the following essay, Greiner analyzes Busch's characterizations in regard to definitive gender roles, sexual identity and freedom in Harry and Catherine and War Babies.

In the following interview, conducted in March 1999, Busch discusses Letters to a Fiction Writer and The Night Inspector, and ruminates about the short-story genre.

In the following interview, Busch discusses his works, analyzes his attachment to his characters, and shares insights on his life and his approach to writing.

In the following excerpt, Pinsker examines how writers feel about their profession, and provides a positive assessment of A Dangerous Profession, Busch's collection of essays about writing.

In the following excerpt, Johnson examines the “novella” genre and gives a favorable review of War Babies.

In the following excerpt, Hanstedt expresses the importance of characterization and a well written plot in novels and, using this criteria, gives Busch's Girls a positive assessment.

In the following excerpt, Frank rationalizes that being an avid reader directly influences an author's work and outlook on life, and examines Busch's A Dangerous Profession in relation to this theory.

[Something] exciting is going on in Busch's work that isn't going on anywhere else. Some of his virtues are old-fashioned enough: he's a superb storyteller, and he makes up people he cares about greatly. But finally his talent is anomalous, and the nature of his achievement is peculiarly hard to describe. One way to begin is by taking note of a paradox that virtually rules contemporary taste in the arts. As an afternoon of gallery-going or a week of off-Broadway will show you, the appro...

In the following review, McGrath feels that Busch demonstrates skillful and powerful writing abilities in several stories in The Children in the Woods, but that many of the tales lack the in-depth characterization and plot structure for which Busch is known.

In the following review, Eder finds that the beginning of Long Way from Home would be excellent as a short story, but by stretching the story to novel length, Busch loses the tight plot and seamless flow present in his other works.

[Busch's] first books, I Wanted a Year Without Fall (1971) and Breathing Trouble (1973), will become known as apprentice fiction, books in which he begins his tentative explorations of unspectacular lives surviving small but numbing crises. They are serviceable fictions that will be discussed and analyzed in future years as introductions to what may develop into a significant canon. With Manual Labor (1974) and Domestic Particulars (1976), however, Busch shows his mastery of familial frustration, his...

In the following review of Girls, Eder finds that Busch's characters appear one-dimensional and his heavy-handed morality is occasionally overbearing.

In the following favorable review of Harry and Catherine, Eder examines the dynamics of the relationship between the two title characters.

In the following review, Nelson praises Busch's portrayal of Jack, an emotionally bombarded protagonist in Girls, but asserts that the novel attempts to combine too many genres resulting in an uneven work.

In the following review, Eder praises the stories in Busch's Absent Friends and provides highlights of the pieces he finds particularly poignant.

In the following review, Allen praises the short stories contained in The Children in the Woods.

In the following review, Allen enthusiastically lauds Busch's eloquence and the form and content of the stories contained in The Children in the Woods.

In the following review, D'Evelyn praises the way Busch challenges readers to make choices in Harry and Catherine.

In the following laudatory review, Guy explores the many deceptions and hidden lives in Busch's Don't Tell Anyone.

In the following review, Fortuna comments on what she considers Busch's adept handling of the moral ambiguity of the modern era in Closing Arguments.

In the following laudatory review of War Babies, Shafer compliments Busch's skillful characterizations.

In the following review, Blades praises Busch's essays in When People Publish, giving particular commendation to the selections that are introspective.

In the following excerpt, Flower compliments Busch's prose in The Night Inspector and comments on what he sees as the novel's gloomy atmosphere in the post-Civil War era.

[The Mutual Friend] is a venturesome novel, a substantial achievement, and it should be widely read. For the author of Manual Labor and Domestic Particulars, this new work represents a change. The previous books were in some sense family documents—intensely personal texts, charged with contemporary discourse and present problems. Busch seemed a kind of poet of claustrophobia. Whether writing of the city or farm, in Brooklyn or New England's hills, he stayed very close to the bone. His characte...

[The Mutual Friend is Frederick Busch's] scrupulous recreation in novel form of Charles Dickens and those who attended him in his last years. The novel begins in [the] 1867 period with Dickens's public readings in America, and the dinner with Longfellow figures in the early pages. "Begins" is a misleading word here, for Busch's admirable technique is anything but linear. With a firm control over his material—he is faithful to the recorded facts and intuitive with hi...

In the following excerpt, Wilhelmus examines the subtle message of hope and empowerment in Absent Friends.

In the following excerpt, Garrett provides a positive assessment of Busch's When People Publish.

Domestic Particulars is a story of unspectacular martyrdoms, senseless sacrifices, of the endurance of long subway rides that end up nowhere except in front of dimly lighted houses behind shrubbery, of the cold of the marriage bed, and the stoicisms of a depression-minded generation, the specific betrayals of energy and excitement that result from the squandering of lives for caution's sake…. Domestic Particulars is not an exhaustive treatise but a series of primary scenes, rich in incident an...

In the following review, Malin examines the violence of action and of words in Closing Arguments.

In the following review, the critic commends Busch for presenting moving prose and heartrending stories in Don't Tell Anyone.

The mind simply boggles at the contortions of which [Busch] is capable. [In Hardwater Country there] is such a wealth of characters, and personae, and occupations, and locales, and craft at his disposal that I am inclined to forgive him his minor deviations from good form. I might prefer the Mink Snopes of The Hamlet to the Buddy Preston of "Land of the Free," but, dammit, Busch has made B. P. equally convincing. And though "Family Circle" milks dry the device of retardation, of ...

Busch's craft, imagination, and versatility are impressive, and his work has met with critical praise, yet he has not found the wide audience he deserves. Rounds, more conventional than his earlier work, may change that; although I don't think it is his most interesting book, it may be the most fully realized. In a sense, [The Mutual Friend] also pays homage to Dickens, who was similarly preoccupied with domestic complexities as well as being a master of certain plot devices Busch employs here...

In the following excerpt, Pritchard presents a primarily favorable assessment of Busch's Sometimes I Live in the Country.

In the following review, Hove praises Busch's The Night Inspector, describing it as an outstanding work of historical fiction.

Despite the homely virtues with which their creator has endowed them, the characters in ["Rounds"] are often a little hard to take. Whether physicians, academics or undergraduates, they all talk too much and at unrelaxed levels of cleverness and cuteness. They leave little unsaid, no verbal shot unreturned. The source of the problem is that Frederick Busch wants to display in realistic detail his characters in their daily rounds…. The author knows how certain things are done in the worl...

Frederick Busch has written seven considerable works of fiction since 1971…. His subject is that bare, forked animal, unaccommodated man, in his domestic particulars: the dark night of the soul, as we all know, is quite likely to happen while you're fixing the flashing on the porch roof. Busch vigorously accepts the incongruity of domestic tragedy and under-writes it, requiring his reader to pay attention and notice the small signs of human experience…. Rounds is full of quick, sure por...

The subject of Frederick Busch's intelligent, careful, often brilliant, but inert novel ["The Mutual Friend"] is Charles Dickens, the driven dying Dickens of 1867–70 as summoned up by Dolby, his tour manager and companion, as he himself is dying 30 years later, a charity case in a Fulham hospital…. It is a serious and scrupulous fiction Mr. Busch has concocted…. There are no elaborate set pieces of Victoriana, no huggermugger "vivid sights and sounds" ...

Frederick Busch has called his novel about Dickens The Mutual Friend. An alternative title might have been Great Expectorations. (p. 61) The Dickens reassembled in [The Mutual Friend] pulsates with energy, creative and destructive: fires break out around him as he uses up himself and others in a consuming commitment to his work. But if the figure is vibrant, it is also familiar. There is nothing new in this reconstruction of the novelist and much is romantically naive. A hackneyed stress falls on the usual ...

Frederick Busch's deeply moving novel [Rounds] probes the harrowed lives of two middle-aged couples struck by recent tragedy…. Faced with a childless void, each pair must overcome the inevitable, stalking demons—the compulsive guilt, the overriding urge to fix blame, the gnawing sense of insufficiency—that bar them from the therapeutic restitution of their selves and the necessary redefinition of their relationships. The Silvers and the Sorensons undertake this task in different ...

[The stories collected in Hardwater Country demonstrates that Frederick Busch] is a skilled writer, as capable of using a woman's consciousness as narrator as a man's. He can write with equal facility and conviction in the first person as a plumber who comes to the house of an incompetent Jew to fix his pump; as an inventory-taker who works at a failing Midwestern bookstore and is at the same time in search of a brother he thinks has died…. Busch's method is to start with the com...

After reading several … stories in "Hardwater Country" with only partial success, I was led to some … reflections. Here they are. When asked how he approached his sculpture, Michelangelo replied that he simply cut away the stone surrounding his vision. In his stories, Mr. Busch offers us the chips and shards of experience surrounding his vision, and leaves it to us to deduce the vision for ourselves. To put it another way, most of his stories seem to be composed of the waste mate...

The stories in "Hardwater Country" are not easy to categorize. Many have rural settings; some do not. Most are narrated by a male character; some are not. Some are written in a terse, broken staccato; some flow easily and naturally. None is boldly dramatic. Each deals with moments and details in routine days of mostly unexceptional lives. The artistry of Frederick Busch consists of stripping away conventions of setting, plot and description, and carrying the reader swiftly into the crevices of...

To judge by [Hardwater Country] anything Frederick Busch wants to convey in the short-story form, he can. He tells you the small, beautiful truths about the usual short-story subjects: family, neighbors, the different kinds of love…. Busch writes delicately and accurately about the power and impotence that children have within the family, as in "What You Might as Well Call Love," "My Father, Cont." and others. His stories are somber, but filled with hope; they are, in fact...