From Powells.com
T. C. Boyle is not easy on the eyes. He's rangy and disconcertingly tall; his hair, a frayed mass of rusty steel wool, jockeys for attention against the wild assortment of earrings that rim his ears; and his prominent goatee makes an eerie compliment to a pair of devilish eyes. Yet, somehow, one suspects Boyle's readers would be disappointed if he cut a less striking figure, for T. C. Boyle's fiction is anything but ordinary. Yes, his stories are perceptive literary portraits of human nature. But T. C. Boyle, in the tradition of such great writers as Mark Twain or Charles Dickens, is a reader's writer. He's sharp as aged cheddar, and he never writes down to his audience, but Boyle always aims to entertain. More often than not he succeeds wildly and hilariously. Boyle clearly relishes the possibilities of our language and his delight in linguistic invention and word play is infectious. T. C. Boyle Stories, which collects all his short fiction to date (for a total of sixty-eight stories), contain some of the funniest, most outrageous and most intelligent satirical stories of the past quarter century, including the classic portrait of a vicious food critic ("Sorry Fugu"), an outrageous send up of our acquisitive culture ("Filthy with Things"), and the telling story of a woman so obsessed with hygiene she insists on wearing a full-body condom ("Modern Love"). This collection is perfect for any reader with a love for language, a taste for the wicked, or an appreciation for masterful storytelling. Farley, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
T. C. Boyle Stories gathers together in one volume all the work from Boyle's four previous collections as well as seven new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories map a wide geography of human emotions. There are no rules in a Boyle story, just as there is no subject too arcane or idea too bizarre to pursue to its skewed conclusion: a primate-center researcher becomes romantically involved with a suave and cultured chimp; Lassie abandons Timmy for a randy coyote; Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nina Khrushchev engage in a secret love affair that threatens the stability of the world; a death-defying stuntman rides across the country strapped to the axle of a big-rig truck. And more: a Hollywood flack does an image makeover of the Ayatollah; a couple searches for the last toads on earth (and a very special erotic charge); an entrepreneur creates a center for acquisitive disorders; an elderly woman valiantly defends her household of stray squirrels. Boyle is equally at home lampooning our most terrible fears, and examining the parameters of human love, frailty, and cultural dislocation at the tail end of a disordered century.
Review
"If you like Boyle's twisted sensibility and gallows humor, this is a must-have compendium. If you haven't yet read him, just delve into this fat collection, which is divided according to the themes 'Love,' 'Death,' 'And Everything in Between.' It doesn't matter where you start the stories are all funny." Susan Jackson, Time Out New York
Review
"Few writers now at work have a wider set of referents, a broader comic range. Boyle has the tale-teller's gift in abundance." Chicago Tribune
Review
"One of the most gifted writers of his generation." The Washington Post
Review
"Everything is here, each of the stories from Boyle's four previous collections plus seven new stories...the blasphemous and the hilarious, the maddening and the moving, the weak and the strong....he's always trying on voices and forms, rummaging through the toy box and pulling out, for his own purposes, other people's shticks." From Jim Shepard, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Happily, in Boyle's stories, normality was never less boring." Darina Molloy, Irish America Magazine
Review
"Boyle is a dazzling writer, a hugely exuberant, infinetely capable storyteller...where lesser talents run out of subjects after their first or second efforts, Mr. Boyle's got a million of them." Wall Street Journal
Review
"Boyle is capable of shifting scales from the lyrical to the vernacular, the literary to the mundane without the slightest strain...the best of his stories not only make the reader see, they also make the reader hear and smell and feel." The New York Times