Synopses & Reviews
Young Japanese seaman Hiro Tanaka, inspired by dreams of the City of Brotherly Love and trained in the ways of the samurai, jumps ship off the coast of Georgia and swims into a net of rabid rednecks, genteel ladies, descendants of slaves, and the denizens of an artists' colony. In the hands of T. Coraghessan Boyle, praised by Digby Diehl in Playboy as "one of the most exciting young fiction writers in America," the result is a sexy, hilarious tragicomedy of thwarted expectations and mistaken identity, love, jealousy, and betrayal.
Review
"[P]art slapstick farce and part social satire. Both elements are brilliantly written and add up to bleak black comedy, because the basic theme of the story is hatred and the folly and cruelty that hatred engenders." The Atlantic
Review
"Expect the unexpected from this consummate showman...Boyle has a multiple-narrator, three-ring-circus going here..." Kirkus Reviews
Review
This irresistible novel is T. Coraghessan Boyle's finest yet....[A]n absolutely stunning work..." New York Times
Review
"...Boyle's unrelieved indictment of prejudice at times seems one-dimensional, his characters so bigoted, foolish, or otherwise unengaging that we are left longing for some sign of human dignity." Library Journal
About the Author
T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of seventeen books of fiction, including, most recently, After the Plague (2001), Drop City (2003), The Inner Circle (2004), and Tooth and Claw (2005). He received a Ph.D. degree in Nineteenth Century British Literature from the University of Iowa in 1977, his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974, and his B.A. in English and History from SUNY Potsdam in 1968. He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern California since 1978. His books are available in a number of foreign languages, including German, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, Danish, Swedish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian. His stories have appeared in most of the major American magazines, including the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, the Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, the Paris Review, GQ, Antaeus, Granta and McSweeney's, and he has been the recipient of a number of literary awards. He currently lives near Santa Barbara with his wife and three children.