• Virtual Death was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award.
• His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize
• two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships
• Guggenheim Fellowship
• Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction
• PEN West Award for Fiction
• the Evil Companions Award

Short Stories

Novels

• Virtual Death (published under the pseudonym Shale Aaron)

Nonfiction

• -a book about a real-life treasure hunt in New Mexico (co-written with David Schweidel).

Play

• Tongues

In many ways, Robert Boswell fits the mythology of the contemporary man in the American West. Known as Boz, he's a lanky, laconic six-footer with a closely cropped beard. Typically garbed in jeans and rumpled shirts with rolled-up sleeves, he drives a pickup truck and listens to Bruce Springsteen. He lives in an adobe house near the Rio Grande in Las Cruces, New Mexico, less than fifty miles from the Mexican border. His voice is a baritone, coming from way deep, and he's a slow talker...slower still with strangers. He claims the desert as his landscape of preference, insisting that the sky really is larger out there, and too much time away from the West makes him claustrophobic.

Through this collectionof 14 works, as he demonstrates again and again, the short story's pulse and meaning lie not in the places where theauthor points the light, but in those areas that remain purposefully obscure.