PROVOCATIVE NEW FICTION FROM THE AUTHOR OF CENTURY’S SON
“Like Richard Yates, Robert Boswell seems always to wish he had better news for us. In the wide-ranging stories of
The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, he wishes we weren’t so lost, so conflicted, so stubborn in our misapprehensions. But he's been watching us too closely, with too clear an eye, too keen an intelligence, and besides, Boswell’s real talent, like Yates’s, is for telling us the truth.”
—RICHARD RUSSO
“Heartbreakers from a writer who knows how to do it right.”
—KIRKUS
“Boswell, whose style and subject matter is somewhat reminiscent of Tobias Wolff and Robert Stone, is a virtuoso of descriptive prose.”
—LIBRARY JOURNAL
Robert Boswell’s extraordinary range is on full display in this crackling new collection. Set mainly in small, gritty American cities, each of these stories is a world unto itself. When two marriages end, one by death, the other divorce, and the two wives, lifelong friends, become strangers to each other. A young man’s obsession with visiting a fortune-teller leaves him nearly homeless. And in the unforgettable title story, a man recounts the summer he spent on a mountain with a loose band of slackers, living in a borrowed house, abstaining from all drugs (other than mushrooms and beer)—and ultimately asking just what kind of harm we can do to one another.
“In this imaginative story collection, author Boswell examines the limits and losses of ordinary souls with technical mastery and profound sympathy.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“The best book of fiction I’ve read in a long time.”
—DAILY BEAST
“[Boswell] shows a sensitive and comprehensive understanding of the quirks that can shake a person off course: from fear, passivity and pride to external knocks and dings that are easier to spot, harder to fix.”
—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
PRAISE FOR ROBERT BOSWELL:
“Boswell is an exuberant and enormously talented writer . . . With dazzling technical skill,
intelligence, and moral seriousness, he mesmerizes us.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“There is no novelist in America who writes about emotional secrets and the hoarding of
private passions with more feeling and insight than Robert Boswell. He writes with a
particularly acute generosity of spirit about all his characters, high and low, human and
animal; if the word ‘humane’ means anything, in an age of terror, we will have to learn, or
re-learn, its definition from books like this.”
—CHARLES BAXTER
“A moving portrait of a family united and divided by a tragic loss, a subtle meditation on
moral responsibility, and a slyly funny comedy of errors,
Century’s Son is a heartbreaking,
ultimately exhilarating novel by one of America’s finest writers.”
—TOM PEROTTA
