A rigorous examination of the workings of fiction by the novelist Robert Boswell, "one of America's finest writers" (Tom Perrotta)Robert Boswell has been writing, reading, and teaching literature for more than twenty years. In this sparkling collection of essays, he brings this vast experience and a keen critical eye to bear on craft issues facing literary writers. Examples from masters such as Leo Tolstoy, Flannery O'Connor, and Alice Munro illustrate this engagin...

Robert Boswell's first novel since Century's Son showcases once again his "dazzling technical skill, intelligence and moral seriousness" (The New York Times Book Review)*A Library Journal "Best Indie Fiction of 2013" *At age thirty-three, James Candler seems to be well on the road to success. He's in line for a big promotion at Onyx Springs, the treatment facility where he's a therapist. He has a fiancée, a sizable house, and a Por...

Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards is an exhilarating collection, as brash as it is wise, by Robert Boswell one of our great storytellersSet mainly in small, gritty American cities, each of these stories is a world unto itself. A man's obsessive visits to a fortuneteller leave him nearly homeless. Time collapses as two marriages slowly dissolve. And in the searing title story, a young man recounts the summer he spent in a mountain town, squatting in a borrowed hous...

Nine long stories and essays, originally published in the acclaimed Ploughshares Solos digital series, create this fourth annual print collection.Visit a small island off the coast of Maine where the reappearance of an old friend might just push a painter suffering from artist’s block over the edge. Meet a newly divorced lecturer of critical theory who, in an effort to spice up his life, gets more than he bargained for. Tag along with a teenage figure-skating star as she returns to...

There's a specter floating above the pews at afternoon mass. Father Montgovery has no idea why the ghostly presence has followed him around for years, but, when a longtime parishioner asks for help in getting his drug-addicted daughter clean, Father Montgovery must do his best to ignore the phantom and shift his focus to the physical, and sometimes harrowing, world. Written by esteemed author and former Ploughshares guest editor Robert Boswell, "The Soul in Paraphrase" explores sin, redemp...

Publisher's summaryBrand-new stories by: Tom Abrahams, Robert Boswell, Sarah Cortez, Anton DiSclafani, Stephanie Jaye Evans, Wanjiku Wa Ngugi, Adrienne Perry, Pia Pico, Reyes Ramirez, Icess Fernandez Rojas, Sehba Sarwar, Leslie Contreras Schwartz, Larry Watts, and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton.Critic reviews"Brooklyn Noir came first in 2004, and now, 15 years later, Houston Noir--14 stories of intrigue, betrayal and death set from Tanglewood to Third Ward penned by cu...

A brilliant novel about a woman determined to make a name for herself as a sitcom star in 1960's London from the bestselling author of Dickens and Prince, High Fidelity and About a BoyFunny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingénue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters. Insightful and humorous, Funny G...

Elizabeth Strout “animates the ordinary with an astonishing force,” wrote The New Yorker on the publication of her Pulitzer Prize–winning Olive Kitteridge. The San Francisco Chronicle praised Strout’s “magnificent gift for humanizing characters.” Now the acclaimed author returns with a stunning novel as powerful and moving as any work in contemporary literature.Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Bur...

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Fourteen stunning short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the great short story writers not just of our time but of any time” (The New York Times Book Review).“Wise and unforgettable. Dear Life is a wondrous gift; a reminder of why Munro’s work endures.”—The Boston GlobeA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, Vogue, The ...

“A mesmerizing novel about a family in crisis.”— Miami HeraldA disquieting and ultimately uplifting novel about a marriage, a family, and human resilience in the face of tragedy, from Wally Lamb, the New York Times bestselling author of The Hour I First Believed and I Know This Much Is True.After 27 years of marriage and three children, Anna Oh—wife, mother, outsider artist—has fallen in love wit...

The instant New York Times bestseller The Washington Post calls a “stunning…superbly rendered” novel, and Entertainment Weekly describes as “a gripping family saga, maybe the best…since The Corrections.”As an Irish immigrant in Queens in 1941, Eileen has dreamed of more in her life—but when she and her family seem to be moving closer to that dream, devastation hits and they must learn how to not only hold on to t...

What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic ...