Book excerpt: Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards is an exhilarating collection, as brash as it is wise, by Robert Boswell one of our great storytellers Set mainly in small, gritty American cities, each of these stories is a world unto itself. A man's obsessive visits to a fortuneteller leave him nearly homeless. Time collapses as two marriages slowly dissolve. And in the searing title story, a young man recounts the summer he spent in a mountain town, squatting in a borrowed house with a loose band of slackers, abstaining from all drugs (other than mushrooms)—and ultimately asking just what kind of harm we can do to one another.