T. C. Boyle

T. C. Boyle is one of the most renowned storytellers of the modern era. This collection of fourteen stories drifts effortlessly between myth and reality, encompassing a panorama of human emotions. In "The Marlbane Manchester Musser Award," Boyle reveals a writer's dismay when a simple trip is turned upside down by a stranger. "Los Gigantes" tells the story of a group of giants being used to create a new breed of soldier for the military. In "The Way...

In the title story of this rich new collection, T. C. Boyle has created so vivid and original a retelling of the story of Victor, the feral boy who was captured running naked through the forests of Napoleonic France, that it becomes not just new, but definitive: yes, this is how it must have been. The tale is by turns magical and moving, a powerful investigation of what it means to be human. There is perhaps no one better than T. C. Boyle at engaging,...

This short story from the collection Wild Child was originally published in Best Life. Smithstown is a divided community, and Cal is right in the middle. He believes, like his best friend Dave, that evolution is scientific fact. But he's drawn to Lynnese, a devout Christian who believes in intelligent design and whose daughter, Mary-Louise, has only widened the chasm forming in the town. As Smithstown is split between science and religion and their...

This short story from the collection Wild Child was originally published in the New Yorker. Gordon is a delivery driver with a predilection toward road rage, and he's on the most important delivery of his life. In Santa Barbara there's a mother of three on life support waiting for Gordon, waiting for the liver he's transporting from Los Angeles. But there's a mudslide, and cars are being swept away, people being buried in the sludge. And Gordon,...

This short story from the collection Wild Child was originally published in the Paris Review and selected for The Best American Short Stories, 2007 by Stephen King. Angelle's father is a drunk, and Angelle and her little sister, Lisette, know it. Their mother has told them as much. But their mother has abandoned them and gone back to France, leaving only the empty promise to return behind. Now Angelle is the key witness in a case that may decide...

The best-selling, PEN-Faulkner award-winning author of The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle is hailed as "America's most imaginative contemporary novelist" (Newsweek). In 1970 a California commune pulls up stakes and moves to the harsh interior of Alaska. The members establish Drop City, a back-to-the-land town, on a foundation of peace and free love. But their idealism cannot prevent tension from rippling through the group. The results are anything but...

Through their celebration of the improbable and unexpected, and their distinctive but complementary grammars of text and film, Coover's selected short fictions entertain by engaging with the tribal myths that surround us-religious, patriotic, literary, erotic, popular-often satirizing the mindsets that, out of some obscure primitive need, perpetuate them.