Rivers Last Longer

As teenagers in Brookline, Massachusetts, Barry and Elliot were best friends, sharing their passions for sports, music, movies, and girls, as well as their dreams of literary fame. Years later, when it appears Barry’s mother will inherit over a million dollars, the friends start planning a literary magazine to jumpstart their careers, only to bitterly fight once the inheritance finally arrives. For six years they don’t see or speak to each other. When they finally reunite in New York, Elliot is a struggling writer with a dead-end teaching job in Philadelphia, and Barry is a millionaire offering Elliot a free apartment where his deceased mother used to live. The friends decide to finally do the magazine they planned and seem ready to conquer the literary world, but Barry has a terrible secret and a terrifying double life that threatens to destroy not only their magazine but the woman they both fall in love with. At once a highly suspenseful psychological thriller and an ambitious literary work told from multiple points of view, Rivers Last Longer takes its turns, sometimes satirically, through the New York literary, art, and film worlds as it tells its story of friendship, ambition, murder, and love.

Praise for Richard Burgin: "Without showiness or fuss, Burgin writes gorgeous evocative prose.... A writer at once elegant and disturbing, Burgin is one of our finest artists of love at its most desperate" --The Chicago Tribune

RICHARD BURGIN is the author of three novels and nine short story collections. His book The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories was listed by The Times Literary Supplement as one of the Best Books of 2006, and three of his other story collections were listed as Notable Books of the Year by The Philadelphia Inquirer. Five of his stories have won Pushcart Prizes, and others have been reprinted in The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction 2008, among numerous others. Burgin's nonfiction books include Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges and Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer. He is the founding editor of Boston Review, New York Arts Journal, and Boulevard.