The Gulf

The Gulf

“The Gulf is a hilarious and healing novel for these polarized times. Reading it consumed my nights, and gave me hope.”

—Tania James, author of The Tusk That Did the Damage

“It’s an amazing novel. You have to read it.”

—Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

“A smart, funny, and hugely entertaining tale.”

—Jonathan Evison, author of Lawn Boy

“Belle Boggs has established herself as both a stellar writer of fiction and a brilliant voice on important issues within our society; in this fine novel, her many talents come together.”

—Jill McCorkle

“The Gulf is literally a DIVINE read―it's also smart, profound, very funny, and finally redemptive.”

—Lee Smith

“[A] wildly engaging exploration of characters finding their way through connection, and through language.”

—Aimee Bender

“I love a misguided entrepreneurial scheme and The Gulf starts with one of the best! Add to that a vividly-drawn group of literary hopefuls and a spiritual conspiracy and what started out feeling like a farce turns into a deliciously sharp commentary on the stories we tell ourselves.”

—Jade Chang, author of The Wangs vs. the World

“A smart, slightly kooky exploration of art and money, faith and politics.”

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

The Art of Waiting

The Art of Waiting

“In this lovely meditation, Belle Boggs explores a landscape suddenly illuminated by the bright light of her own uncertain future. Her great mind is at work through it all, considering captive gorillas and biology and Virginia Woolf and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Raising Arizona and adoption and surrogacy and wells that run dry. What The Art of Waiting suggests to me is that all our moments that feel fruitless may be bearing their own sort of fruit, in their own time.”

—Eula Biss, author of On Immunity

“Belle Boggs has taken an experience often understood in terms of absence—the process and procedures and pain of infertility—and re-illuminated it in terms of presence: the presence of longing, the presence of effort, the presence of patience and community. Her book explodes the word 'infertility' so that it’s no longer a single word but a thousand stories, a thousand possible families—thwarted, growing, reimagined. Boggs’ mind is nimble and surprising, her voice penetrating and humble, her insights keen and striated. Her definition of family is full of possibility and permutation, and there is an empathetic force to her work—her summoning of our collective vision, her call to openness—that’s absolutely thrilling.”

—Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

“In this profound, deeply moving study of fertility and motherhood, Belle Boggs takes us on a remarkable journey. Her book ponders the nature of reproduction in modern America, which is of necessity a means of pondering the nature of family, which is in turn a means of pondering the nature of intimacy and love. The wisdom comes easily here, as Boggs considers the searing pain of disappointment, every structure of proleptic hope, and the widening of human relationships. She does all this and more in luminous, generous prose.”

—Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree

Mattaponi Queen

Mattaponi Queen

Winner of the Bakeless Prize for Fiction

“Reading these stories is satisfying, like going to a concert in which the musicians, you can just tell, have given everything for the moment: your unforgettable evening.”

—Susan Salter Reynolds for the Los Angeles Times

“A great achievement as [Boggs] has created a rich, capacious fictional territory about the lives of down-on-their luck people (forlorn principals, vengeful nurses, junkies trying to be good parents) that we don’t often encounter in fiction but fill the world.”

—The Daily Beast