February 3, 2012 Richard Bausch’s last novel, Peace was a war story set in Northern Italy during World War II. A spare, gorgeous book hardly longer than a novella, the book was profoundly praised all over the literary world and won for Bausch the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The Memphis writer’s forthcoming novel opens on September 11, 2001, and promises to be another examination of the human cost of war:
The television newswoman went on talking in a kind of sick droning about the time, “minutes past the hour” again, the exact moment of the first attack, the precise instant of the second one. She spoke carefully and slowly, in clipped phrases without inflection, concentrating on the smallest details, as a person might think of measurements and exactness and stringent minutiae in order to maintain some hold on sanity itself. And now the camera caught another body hurtling down, that of a man, his suit jacket open to a white shirt and a tie. The female newscaster tried to report it. “People leaping,” she said, and her voice shook, and you could hear the failure in it of full expression: clearly she was only barely able to keep from screaming herself.
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