<DIV>In <I>Hide Island</I>, his sixteenth book and eighth collection of stories, Richard Burgin explores themes of love and crime, memory and identity, abuse and redemption, and the contradictory battle between our fierce struggle to live lives worth remembering and our desire to disentangle ourselves from a past we wish to forget.<br><br> The stories involve an extraordinarily variegated group of characters—ranging from doctors and drug dealers, prostitutes and businessmen, to writers and domestic workers. <I>Hide Island</I> gives voice to the profoundly tormented as well as those who seek and find enlightenment, justifying Joyce Carol Oates’ praise in <I>Newsweek’s The Daily Beast</I> that “What Edgar Allan Poe did for the psychotic soul, Richard Burgin does for the deeply neurotic who pass among us disguised as so seemingly ‘normal’ we may mistake them for ourselves.” And why the <I>Boston Globe</I> concluded that “Burgin’s tales capture the strangeness of a world that is simultaneously frightening and reassuring, and in the contemporary American short story nothing quite resembles his singular voice.”<BR></div>