Robert Boswell

Tells of Doc Noss--part-adventurer, part-conman--who supposedly discovered fabulous treasure inside the caverns of New Mexico's Victorio Peak in 1937, and then dynamited the tunnel to hide the treasure from other treasure hunters. Decades later his grandson decided to find that treasure.

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 engaging discussion of what makes great writing. At the same time, Boswell moves readers beyond the classroom, candidly sharing the experiences that have shaped his own writing life. A chance encounter in a hotel bar leads to a fascinating glimpse into his imaginative process. And through the story of a boyhood adventure, Boswell details how important it is for writers to give themselves over to what he calls the “half-known world” of fiction, where surprise and meaning converge.

"In the small college town of Hayden, Illinois, Morgan and Zhenya have settled into a loveless, stagnant marriage. He is a former labor organizer who now works as a garbage collector, and she is a political science professor and the daughter of a prominent Russian emigre. The suicide of their son, Philip, some ten years before has left the pair emotionally dead, lacking even the courage or initiative to separate from each other. Their surviving child, Emma, has become a teenage mother and refuses to reveal the identity of her child's father.". "Into this sullen mix marches the Century's Son, Peter Ivanovich Kamenev, Zhenya's exasperating father. A Russian writer and an impresario of history, Peter Ivanovich claims to have had the opportunity to assassinate Joseph Stalin, to have marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the American South, and to have visited a strip club with Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. Unfortunately, Zhenya has discovered several inconsistencies in her father's invented history, and she also discovers the limits of her patience with his neediness and self-dramatization.". "Peter's arrival, though it tears at the family, also rejuvenates it. He forces Morgan and Zhenya to confront themselves, their children alive and dead, and their lives past, present, and future, as lived, as planned, and as imagined. He embraces Emma and her child; he recognizes and exploits all of the small hypocrisies and foibles of daily life. His deceitful, smooth-talking vibrancy invigorates and infuriates everybody around him."--BOOK JACKET.

Gay Schaefer is a sultry truck dispatcher who is determined to ignore smalltown conventions and possess her life - to make it "original, graceful, adventurous." Separated from her husband of fifteen years, she meets him once a month at the Desert Oasis Motel for glorious carousing, but pretends they are divorced for the benefit of her teenaged daughter. Meanwhile, hanging around with the local basketball coach sends a strange charge darting through her chest - a casual affair, at first, that threatens to upset the balance of her carefully constructed life. Gay's daughter, Rita, is muddled, pudgy, obliged to admit that she, unlike her mother, doesn't "know how to dress for disaster." She doesn't even know whether it actually spells disaster when the river behind her house - the Rio Grande, chugging through New Mexico on its way to becoming the border - turns black, black as coal or oil or death, the night before she starts high school. During the year beginning that night, disaster does seem to stalk Rita, getting more and more tangible, shaking even her mother's self-possession. It's got something to do with her best friend, Cecilia Calzado - and with Cecilia's brother Enrique, whom Rita starts dating, even though he's still in junior high - and with the fact that years ago Mr. Calzado had moved his family out of the shabby colonia across the river and earned the wrath of a menacing person named Rudy Salazar.

Robert Boswell, author of the highly acclaimed Mystery Ride and Crooked Hearts, has written a stunning new collection of short stories. In them, he brings us into the familiar territory of family relationships and brilliantly describes the strain, the humor, the confusion, and the kaleidoscope of feelings these bonds evoke. But he also introduces us to new terrain as he places us in worlds so heightened by emotion that, at times, the commonplace turns eerie and the odd becomes downright scary. In "Rain," Karen and Orla are paired off in a search party formed to find a lost boy during a storm. Although the boy is located, the two women discover during their search that parts of themselves, over the years, have gone missing. In "Glissando," a father and son drift through life, jobs, schools, towns, and women trying to both find and escape their past. An alcoholic husband, in "The Good Man," resolves to stop drinking after he finds a note tacked to the door from his wife that says "Good-bye, you shit." In order to get his family back, he suffers through maggot-filled hallucinations and vomit-covered nights at the rehabilitation center, but the worst of not drinking has yet to come. Alvin and Rita Bishop lose their infant girl to crib death in "The Earth's Crown"; Rita goes mad with grief and Alvin has an affair with a pregnant woman. "The Products of Love" tells of Paula and Eugene's mysterious marriage. And in "Living to Be a Hundred," three men on a construction crew hammer out their lives and loves - literally. Soul-piercing and freshly funny, these stories are at once strikingly contemporary and timeless in their power to move us.

When a Mystery Weekend is planned at Pine Hollow Stable, the Saddle Club may end up solving a real mystery.

From the outside James Chandler's life appears to be perfect, but looks can often be deceiving.