Several months ago, Robin Black was featured in the New York Times Magazine’s “Lives” column, relating her brush with reality TV. The extremely disheveled outward appearance of her house made it a candidate for a show she jokingly calls Your Neighbors Must Really Hate You.

“I can sympathize with people’s pains, but not with their pleasure,” said Aldous Huxley, author of the 1932 novel, Brave New World. “There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.”

Alain de Botton would be a great guy to sit next to on a bus, get stuck with in an elevator, turn out to be your long lost brother. In his books, anyway, he seems to move through the world with just the right amounts of enthusiasm and irony, self-deprecation and show-offiness, sincerity and sport.

Despite the promise of its title, insensitive bastards do not reign in Robert Boswell’s latest collection of stories.

Seven stories and seven essays comprise Firan’s fourth prose collection in English.