SELINSGROVE, Pa. - Author Richard Bausch will share his stories in a reading that is free and open to the public on Monday, November 8, at 7:30 p.m. in Susquehanna University's Isaacs Auditorium in Seibert Hall.

"My vital subjects are family, fear, love, and anything that is irrecoverable and missed," says Bausch, "but I'll dispense with all of that for a good story.... I grew up listening to my father tell stories--he is a great story-teller, and all the Bauschs can do it."

Bausch is the author of eight novels and three volumes of stories, including Somebody I'm Longing to See, which was featured in the August 1999 issue of the New York Times Book Review. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, and numerous literary journals and anthologies, including the O'Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories. In 1997, Bausch was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Prior to becoming an author, Bausch worked as a singer-songwriter, a comedian and a survival instructor for the U.S. Air Force. Bausch is currently a professor of English at George Mason University, teaching in the graduate program in creative writing.

Bausch says, "My only criterion [for my writing] is that fiction make feeling, that it deepen feeling. If it doesn't do that it's not fiction." According to a biography on the Barnes and Noble Web site, Bausch is fulfilling this desire: "Bausch's works are true to his self-description: dealing with the ordinary tragedies of American family life in our time, they spring from feeling and, at their best, create it."

The reading is partially sponsored by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. For more information, please contact Dr. Gary Fincke, professor of English and director of Susquehanna University's Writer's Institute at (570) 372-4164.