Dancing in the Movies

Dancing in the Movies is a powerful book, taut and stark, intense with human passion. Bluntly, bravely, Robert Boswell explores that gray borderland where betrayal mixes with trust, violence with love, despair with hope. The final effect is overwhelming. - Tim O'Brien [Boswell offers] six dexterously shaped stories.... [His] believable characters are involved in situations that are sometimes painfully true-to-life.... [Dancing in the Movies is] a satisfying, if at times disturbing, collection. - Publishers Weekly Boswell's stories... start from human lives in blood, bone, and flesh. We are not permitted to forget that these embodied creatures have memories - traumatic memories of delivering live babies from the wombs of their dead Vietnamese mothers; beautiful memories of constellations and love; puzzled memories with delayed meaning (the story 'Kentucky'). The stories say that memory lives as tenaciously as the flesh - perhaps more tenaciously, for Boswell's characters might lose limbs or prospects or illusions, but they never lose the memories that make them real. - Studies in Short Fiction