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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

From the bestselling author of The Wife—Meg Wolitzer’s “hilariously moving, sharply written novel” (USA TODAY), hailed by critics and loved by readers worldwide, with its “dead-on observations about sex, marriage, and the family ties that strangle and bind” (Cleveland Plain Dealer).Crackling with intelligence and humor, The Position is the masterful story of one extraordinary family at the hilarious height of the sexual revolutio...

When Joseph Weissmann divorced his wife, he was seventy eight years old and she was seventy-five...He said the words "Irreconcilable differences," and saw real confusion in his wife's eyes."Irreconcilable differences?" she said. "Of course there are irreconcilable differences. What on earth does that have to do with divorce?"So begins The Three Weissmanns of Westport, a sparkling, and stinging, contemporary adaptation of Sense and Sensib...

I was strong and he was not so it was me went to war to defend the Republic. I stepped across the border out of Indiana into Ohio. Twenty dollars, two salt-pork sandwiches, and I took jerky, biscuits, six old apples, fresh underthings and a blanket too.There was a conflagration to come; I wanted to lend it my spark.Meet Gallant Ash: hero, folk legend and master of war. Ash is a leader of men and a brutal and fearless soldier. Will look you dead in the eye ...

Stephen King’s #1 New York Times bestseller is a “wild, powerful, disturbing” (The Washington Post Book World) classic about evil that exists far beyond the grave—among his most iconic and frightening novels.When Dr. Louis Creed takes a new job and moves his family to the idyllic rural town of Ludlow, Maine, this new beginning seems too good to be true. Despite Ludlow’s tranquility, an undercurrent of danger exists here. Those trucks on the road o...

**From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—one of Margaret Atwood’s most unforgettable characters lurks at the center of this intricate novel like a spider in a web. The glamorous, irresistible, unscrupulous Zenia is nothing less than a fairy-tale villain in the memories of her former friends.Roz, Charis, and Tony—university classmates decades ago—were reunited at Zenia’s funeral and have met monthly for lunch ever since, obse...

"The familiar tale of star-crossed lovers is revisited with gripping immediacy and compelling freshness . . . a voice readers will not soon forget" (Stephanie Kallos, national bestselling author).A fiercely beautiful love story for the ages, The Disappeared traces one woman's three-decades-long journey from the peaceful streets of Montreal to the war-torn villages of Cambodia, as a brief affair turns into a grand passion of loss and remembrance, set agains...