T. C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle - Hardcover

Boyle, T. Coraghessan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670026255 ISBN 13: 9780670026258

Publisher: Viking Pr, 2013

Synopsis

A second volume of collected short fiction from the bestselling author and winner of the 2015 Rea Award for the Short Story

Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T.C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. In 1998,T.C. Boyle Stories brought together the author’s first four collections to critical acclaim. Now,T.C. Boyle Stories II gathers the work from his three most recent collections along with fourteen new tales previously unpublished in book form as well as a preface in which Boyle looks back on his career as a writer of stories and the art of making them.

By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle’s stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The fifty-eight stories in this new volume, written over the last eighteen years, reflect his maturing themes. Along with the satires and tall tales that established his reputation, readers will find stories speaking to contemporary social issues, from air rage to abortion doctors, and character-driven tales of quiet power and passion. Others capture timeless themes, from first love and its consequences to confrontations with mortality, or explore the conflict between civilization and wildness. The new stories find Boyle engagingly testing his characters’ emotional and physical endurance, whether it’s a group of giants being bred as weapons of war in a fictional Latin American country, a Russian woman who ignores dire warnings in returning to her radiation-contaminated home, a hermetic writer who gets more than a break in his routine when he travels to receive a minor award, or a man in a California mountain town who goes a little too far in his concern for a widow.

Mordant wit, emotional power, exquisite prose: it is all here in abundance. T.C. Boyle Stories IIis a grand career statement from a writer whose imagination knows no bounds.

About this title

Review:

This vast volume contains some of the best, funniest, bleakest, most unsettling short stories I've ever read ... Incredibly good - a book to savour (The Times)

Complicated characters, like twists, are among the orthodox pleasures on offer here ... You don't feel cheated, reading Boyle - while the head knows there's manipulation and artifice, the heart thumps (Observer)

An important book that contains revelation, tension and beauty (Philip Womack Daily Telegraph)

Boyle has a talent for describing events we may never experience with an arresting matter-of-factness. There is a thrill to this, and to not knowing where he will take us next (Chris Power Guardian)

A sort of Frank Zappa of American letters . Like the Beat writers before him, Boyle documents American life in the underbelly . Boyle is incapable of writing a boring sentence ... he is a master of the short story form (Ian Thomson Financial Times)

The master of edgy short fiction (William Leith, Evening Standard)

Book Description:

The second volume of collected short fiction from American master T.C. Boyle, including his previous three collections and fourteen new stories

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Pr
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0670026255
• ISBN 13: 9780670026258
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 918