Robert Boswell (1)
Author of Mystery Ride
About the Author
Robert Boswell is Professor of English at New Mexico State University and is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He lives with his wife, the writer Antonya Nelson, and their children in Las Cruces, New Mexico , and Telluride, Colorado.
Works by Robert Boswell
Mystery Ride 1 copy
Associated Works
Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West 1950 to the Present (2000) — Contributor — 148 copies, 1 review
The Worst Years of Your Life: Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst-Ridden, Lust-Addled, and Deeply Misunderstood… (2007) — Contributor — 90 copies
High Infidelity: 24 Great Short Stories About Adultery by Some of Our Best Contemporary Authors (1997) — Contributor — 31 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA
Houston, Texas, USA
Telluride, Colorado, USA - Short biography
- [from author's website]
Robert Boswell has published seven novels, three story collections, and two books of nonfiction. He has had two plays produced. His work has earned him two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, a Lila Wallace/Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the PEN West Award for Fiction, the John Gassner Prize for Playwriting, and the Evil Companions Award. The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards was a finalist for the 2010 PEN USA Award in Fiction. What Men Call Treasure was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Nonfiction Spur Award. Both the Chicago Tribune and Publisher's Weekly named Mystery Ride as one of the best books of the year. The London Independent picked The Geography of Desire as one of the best books of the year. Virtual Death was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award and was named by the Science Fiction Chronicle as one of the best novels of the year. Boswell has published more than 70 stories and essays. They have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Esquire, Colorado Review, Epoch, Ploughshares, and many other magazines and anthologies. He holds the Cullen Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston. He lives in Houston, Texas; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Telluride, Colorado. He also spends time in a ghost town high in the Rockies.
Members
Reviews
The stories are quite varied but all are about quirky, flawed and somewhat disturbing characters. Boswell has a knack for developing interesting characters and drawing us into some unusual situations. I prefer a story to be more conclusively tied together at the end, but Boswell leaves us pondering the implications and just exactly how to interpret what the story's title implies. Though intrigued by the offbeat characters, it took me awhile to appreciate his style. I have been stealthily seduced by the stories, so my rating edged up to 4 stars, perhaps I may need to delve deeper into Boswell's world.… (more)
The stories are quite varied but all are about quirky, flawed and somewhat disturbing characters. Boswell has a knack for developing interesting characters and drawing us into some unusual situations. I prefer a story to be more conclusively tied together at the end, but Boswell leaves us pondering the implications and just exactly how to interpret what the story's title implies. Though intrigued by the offbeat characters, it took me awhile to appreciate his style. I have been stealthily seduced by the stories, so my rating edged up to 4 stars, perhaps I may need to delve deeper into Boswell's world.… (more)
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Statistics
- Works
- 13
- Also by
- 8
- Members
- 757
- Popularity
- #33,606
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 14
- ISBNs
- 44
- Languages
- 3
Robert Boswell's 1992 novel “Mystery Ride” is not read much today — try finding it in a bookstore — but in the 1990s it was a bestseller. The title may have been a bit deceptive. One wonders how many people bought it assuming it to be a murder mystery, perhaps taking place during a drive across the country. There's plenty of travel in Boswell's story, yet the ride of the title takes place mostly on an Iowa farm.
Very much in love when they buy the farm in 1971, Angela and Stephen Landis each envision a different kind of future. She sees the farm as just a youthful fling, a charming place to live during their extended honeymoon. He actually wants to become a farmer. And so she divorces the man she still loves and moves west with their young daughter, hoping he will follow her. He doesn't.
The story skips forward a number of years when their daughter, Dulcie, has become a troubled teenager whom Angela can no longer manage. She decides to take the girl back to the farm for the summer to see if Stephen can control her. Meanwhile she has remarried to a dashing but unfaithful man named Quinn, while a woman named Leah and her own teenage daughter, Roxanne, have just moved into the farmhouse with Stephen.
In other hands this plot could easily turn into a comedy, but Boswell has other, better ideas. Readers, like the characters themselves, have no idea where this ride might take them.… (more)