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Will Boast

Will Boast is the author of the novel Daphne (Norton/Liveright, 2018), a best-selling memoir, Epilogue (Norton/Liveright, 2014), and a story collection, Power Ballads (Iowa, 2011), which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and the American Scholar, among other publications. He’s been a Stegner Fellow and a Rome Prize Fellow. His essay “Pain” appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of VQR and was listed as a notable essay in Best American Essays.

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Unmanned

By Will Boast

Summer 2018 | Essays

  1. Serrekunda’s beach, the Gambia’s biggest tourist draw, empty again. Two years ago it was fear of Ebola. Now, political crisis, checkpoints, soldiers with AK-47s, bazookas. Alex Sesouy, a tourist guide, had time to talk. Still, he hesi [...]

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R. Wesley/Getty

Pain

By Will Boast

Winter 2014 | Memoir

My father was never one to complain. On the morning of the day he died, an ulcer he’d suffered from for years, and left untreated, ruptured and began to bleed. Two days later I met with the town coroner. He told me the end had been painless, that, as his life leached away, my father would only have felt increasingly weak and light-​headed. The coroner, trying to make me feel better, was lying.

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