T.C. Boyle Stories
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • The first volume of collected short fiction from the award–winning author of The Tortilla Curtain, featuring sixty-eight “varied, clever, and delightful” (The Chicago Tribune) short stories, including seven never-before-published tales
“Each [story hops] with manic energy . . . at his vaulting, imaginative best Boyle suggests the bastard child of Flannery O’Connor and Monty Python.”—The Miami Herald
WINNER OF THE PEN/MALAMUD AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE PEN CENTER/USA WEST LITERARY AWARD
By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, T.C. Boyle’s stories map a wide geography of human emotions. Whether he is writing about eccentrics, charlatans, or exotic seekers after the truth, or about decent vulnerable people trying to forge some kind of connection in an unfriendly world, the effect is always surprising and uniquely his own. Running throughout is Boyle’s razor-sharp sense of humor, and his singular genius for dissecting America’s obsession with image and materialism.
Drawn from Descent of Man, Greasy Lake, If the River Was Whiskey, and Without a Hero alongside seven new tales, the sixty-eight stories in this volume are remarkable in their range, richness, and exuberance. T.C. Boyle Stories is a book of small treasures, a definitive gift for Boyle fans and for every reader ready to discover the “ferocious, delicious imagination” (Los Angeles Times Book Review) of a “vibrant sensibility fully engaged with American society” (The New York Times).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A premier practitioner of short fiction, Boyle (Water Music) gathers two decades worth of work in one volume of almost 70 stories, adding seven pieces (three previously unpublished) to the contents of his previous four collections. The entries are organized thematically, evenly divided among "Love," "Death" and "And Everything In Between"; thus chronology is jumbled and early pieces flank more recent ones. The "Love" stories are so polished and sophisticated they all but glitter. In them, very often a hapless male, modestly hoping merely to get laid, encounters an obsessed woman and finds himself eventually undone. Sex itself is not especially important to Boyle, but obsession is. Obsessions of one sort or another (animal activism, germophobia, Elvis, frogs, squirrels, whales) inform these stories, which sparkle with wicked wit and exuberant prose. The last "Love" story serves as a sad transition to the tales of "Death." "Juliana Cloth" chronicles the way a sexually transmitted virus decimates an African town, and a girl goes--knowingly--to an embrace that will kill her. The cumulative effect of the "Death" section, though, is numbing, repetitiously grotesque and finally gratuitous. However, the collection's texture quickens in the last section, "And Everything In Between," a potpourri of chilling fables. Throughout Boyle's work, real people (Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Carry Nation, Robert Johnson, Mao, Jack Kerouac, Jacques Cousteau) appear in narrative out-takes that are invariably amusing and, like Boyle's more serious work, mordant, worldly and irreverent. Author tour.
