Robert Boswell is a novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist whose primary thematic preoccupation is the conflict between desire and ethical demands that people face in their relationships with others. In his writing he gives additional scope to this issue of how one navigates the difficult terrain of emotions and relationships by linking it tightly to larger issues within the United States-specifically race. As he said of his work in a 1990 interview with Anne Marie Mackler, "I tend to write a lot about how men and women get along- and race, how people of different races get along. I'm obsessed with these matters because I feel they are important. They are issues essential to being alive, being human, in this country." In this preoccupation Boswell is a quintessentially American writer, continuing in part the ongoing conversation about race that Mark Twain (one of Boswell's seminal influences) undertook in The...