Tooth and Claw
and Other Stories
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
A “fierce [and] funny” (Entertainment Weekly) collection of fourteen stories exploring humanity’s wild side, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain
“Whether Boyle is breaking your heart or making you laugh, you just don’t care because he is so darned good at it.”—San Francisco Chronicle
The fourteen stories gathered here display Boyle’s imaginative muscle, emotional sensitivity, and astonishing range. There are whimsical tales, including “Swept Away,” which tells of a female ornithologist who falls in love on the blustery island of Unst, and “The Kind Assassin,” about a bored and loveless radio shock jock who sets the world record for most continuous hours without sleep—and who may never sleep again. In the title story, a young man must contend with a vicious feral cat from Africa that he won in a bar bet. And in “Dogology,” a young woman in suburban New England becomes so obsessed with man’s best friend that she begins to lose her own identity to a pack of strays.
Muscular, provocative, and blurring the boundaries between humans and nature, the funny and the shocking, Tooth and Claw is Boyle at his best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The threat of imminent demise whether self-inflicted or from an ungentle Mother Nature hovers in Boyle's seventh collection (after the novel The Inner Circle). Ravenous alligators make a memorable cameo in "Jubilation," in which a divorced man seeking community and stability moves into a "model" town erected in a Florida theme park (think Disney's Celebration), only to find that benign surfaces conceal dangerous depths. This theme of civilization versus wilderness also underpins the weird and wonderful "Dogology," in which a young woman's frustration with the accoutrements of the human world compels her to run on all fours with a pack of neighborhood dogs. "Here Comes" one of the collection's more realistic pieces describes the anxious circumstances of a suddenly homeless alcoholic poised to slip through the cracks for good in a Southern California town. Substance abuse figures again in "Up Against the Wall," about a young man seduced by a dissolute new crowd, while his parents' marital discord and the Vietnam War tug at the edges of his drugged-out awareness. The wired rhythm of Boyle's prose and the enormity of his imagination make this collection irresistible; with it he continues to shore up his place as one of the most distinctive, funniest and finest writers around. (On sale Sept. 12)
