What do you think?
Rate this book
Living To Be A Hundred: Stories
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.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
190 pages, Hardcover
First published March 29, 1994
46 people want to read
About the author
Robert Boswell
69 books51 followersRobert Boswell is the author of eleven books, including The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, a story collection with Graywolf Press, in April 2009. His novels: Century's Son, American Owned Love, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, and Crooked Hearts. His other story collections: Living to Be 100 and Dancing in the Movies. His nonfiction: The Half-Known World, a book on the craft of writing, and What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak, a book about a real-life treasure hunt in New Mexico (co-written with David Schweidel). His cyberpunk novel Virtual Death (published under the pseudonym Shale Aaron) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award.
His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Best Stories from the South, Esquire, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, and many other magazines.
He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson.
His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Best Stories from the South, Esquire, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, and many other magazines.
He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 15, 2012
Powerful.
Robert Boswell famously said, "If the nonfiction writer has to live in another’s shoes, the fiction writer has to cobble together the shoes and fill them with some imaginary creature before emptying them and seeing if they’re his size."
I feel as if these are the stories that Sam Shepard has been trying to write. Stories dripping with filth; imbued with horrible and touching glimpses into the passion that stimulates the derelict. Ultimately an endearing and meaningful collection.
Read it.
Robert Boswell famously said, "If the nonfiction writer has to live in another’s shoes, the fiction writer has to cobble together the shoes and fill them with some imaginary creature before emptying them and seeing if they’re his size."
I feel as if these are the stories that Sam Shepard has been trying to write. Stories dripping with filth; imbued with horrible and touching glimpses into the passion that stimulates the derelict. Ultimately an endearing and meaningful collection.
Read it.
December 16, 2015
I feel that this book was good in many aspects. He did a great job of allowing you to picture many instances throughout the book with great imagery and diction. Also the stories in the book are very well written and easy to read. It didn't really have a single plot do to the fact that it is many stories in one but the stories themselves are very well written and have great plots. The characters in this book were very believable and I feel you are able to relate to them very well in all of the stories. The tone seemed to be positive and negative depending on the story that was being told. Overall a great book, and I recommend it to anyone who is looking for something new to read.
December 13, 2007
the tenderness in these stories reminds me a lot of Steinbeck. There are several wonderful stories, but my favorite might be the shortest, "Brilliant Mistake"--I even have thoughts of memorizing it sometime soon.
"And still I think I left at the right time, still I think swimming underwater with the drink was a good exit, and the girl, a woman now, must remember our few minutes in the dark of the pool with the same appreciative mystery that I do.
It is the one perfect moment in my life."
"And still I think I left at the right time, still I think swimming underwater with the drink was a good exit, and the girl, a woman now, must remember our few minutes in the dark of the pool with the same appreciative mystery that I do.
It is the one perfect moment in my life."
May 31, 2012
Robert Boswell kinda snuck up on me.
I came to know of him through a stunner of a lecture he gave at Warren Wilson on complex moments in fiction, in which he proved he could not only tell a story, but perform it as well. I picked up his book of essays on writing, The Half-Known World, and was beyond impressed at the light he shed on various tricky craft elements – The Half-Known World has become one of my go-to reference texts. All of this, combined with the fact that he’s one of the powerhouse professors at my MFA program, has set me on a mission to read everything he’s written.
Starting with Living to Be 100.
The mechanics of Rain and The Products of Love both begin in familiar places. I thought I could anticipate how those stories would turn out, and I was wrong, on both counts. I’d read Living to Be a Hundred in Best American Short Stories 1989. The pseudo-love triangle that features in story, again, did not end up like I expected. Another thing became clear to me with this one: Boswell can twist a story with a single sentence.
There are some surprising moments of tenderness in The Earth’s Crown, in which a married, but lonely shop keeper finds love and friendship with a woman who comes to a small town to carry her surrogate pregnancy to term.
And then there’s that story.
You know that story, the story that you read it and think, “Whatever else comes in this collection, this story was worth reading the whole thing”? Glissando is that story. It's one of those stories that satisfies me, so completely.
Boswell’s work is steadily realist, very naturalist, yet always surprising, and engaging. He does his business quietly, subtly, yet solidly.
First-rate.
I came to know of him through a stunner of a lecture he gave at Warren Wilson on complex moments in fiction, in which he proved he could not only tell a story, but perform it as well. I picked up his book of essays on writing, The Half-Known World, and was beyond impressed at the light he shed on various tricky craft elements – The Half-Known World has become one of my go-to reference texts. All of this, combined with the fact that he’s one of the powerhouse professors at my MFA program, has set me on a mission to read everything he’s written.
Starting with Living to Be 100.
The mechanics of Rain and The Products of Love both begin in familiar places. I thought I could anticipate how those stories would turn out, and I was wrong, on both counts. I’d read Living to Be a Hundred in Best American Short Stories 1989. The pseudo-love triangle that features in story, again, did not end up like I expected. Another thing became clear to me with this one: Boswell can twist a story with a single sentence.
There are some surprising moments of tenderness in The Earth’s Crown, in which a married, but lonely shop keeper finds love and friendship with a woman who comes to a small town to carry her surrogate pregnancy to term.
And then there’s that story.
You know that story, the story that you read it and think, “Whatever else comes in this collection, this story was worth reading the whole thing”? Glissando is that story. It's one of those stories that satisfies me, so completely.
Boswell’s work is steadily realist, very naturalist, yet always surprising, and engaging. He does his business quietly, subtly, yet solidly.
First-rate.
July 18, 2007
I really enjoyed this book. I liked that the stories weren't super high-concept, and the author uses a lot of really interesting imagery. My two favorite stories were "The Earth's Crown" and "Grief," mostly for their surprisingly emotional endings.
August 1, 2011
1995 PEN Center USA Award Winner for Fiction
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews