Will Boast

Biography

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, the Guardian, and the American Scholar, among other publications. He has been a Stegner Fellow and a Rome Prize Fellow.

See Work

ESSAYS / Winter 2024

From the Gut

By Will Boast ,  Illustration by Margeaux Walter

By my late twenties, it had gotten so bad I could barely sleep. Many people toss and turn after, say, a baked brie or Blazin’ Buffalo Wings. But at twenty-eight, even less-quarrelsome foods—steak, carrots, celery, pork chops, hummus, jicama...

Will Boast
ESSAYS / Summer 2022

The Grammar of Exile

By Will Boast ,  Illustration by Edmon de Haro

Hard Lessons in the Language of Opportunity
#VQRTRUESTORY / Summer 2018

Unmanned

By Will Boast
REPORTING / Summer 2017

A Kingdom for a Horse

By Will Boast ,  Illustrations by Guy Stauber

 

Kokpar and the Future of Kazakhstan

 
MEMOIR / Winter 2014

Pain

By Will Boast

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...