25 Books You Can't Put Down
Go on, take what you need. A perfect mystery, a mouthful of poetry...;O serves up a smorgasbord of the summer's best reads.
By Cathleen Medwick
The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards by Robert Boswell
288 pages; Graywolf
Robert Boswell's stories are packed with latent emotion, like explosives about to detonate. In The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (Graywolf), characters move through life with trepidation, as relationships fracture and past collides with present. "Time is not a river," thinks one traumatized young man. "Time is a tree. Branches, roots, limbs, the leafing. Time defoliates. Time buds. Time cracks." An unnerving, fascinating collection.
Robert Boswell's stories are packed with latent emotion, like explosives about to detonate. In The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (Graywolf), characters move through life with trepidation, as relationships fracture and past collides with present. "Time is not a river," thinks one traumatized young man. "Time is a tree. Branches, roots, limbs, the leafing. Time defoliates. Time buds. Time cracks." An unnerving, fascinating collection.
From the July 2009 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine