“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
“[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.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“Heartbreakers from a writer who knows how to do it
right.”—KIRKUS REVIEWS “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 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.”
