T C Boyle Books In Order

Water Music

T.C. Boyle’s riotous first novel now in a new edition for its 25th anniversary Twenty five years ago, T.C. Boyle published his first novel, Water Music a funny, bawdy, extremely entertaining novel of imaginative and stylistic fancy that announced to the world Boyle s tremendous gifts as a storyteller. Set in the late eighteenth century, Water Music follows the wild adventures of Ned Rise, thief and who*remaster, and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer, through London s seamy gutters and Scotland s scenic highlands to their grand meeting in the heart of darkest Africa. There they join forces and wend their hilarious way to the source of the Niger. BACKCOVER: Ribald, hilarious, exotic an engrossing flight of the literary imagination. Los Angeles Times Water Music does for fiction what Raiders of the Lost Ark did for film…
. Boyle is an adept plotter, a crazed humorist, and a fierce describer. The Boston Globe High comic fiction…
Boyle is a writer of considerable talent. He pulls off his most implausible inventions with wit, a perfect sense of timing, and his considerable linguistic gifts. The Washington Post

Budding Prospects

A comic novel which satirises our eternal quest for money, and our habits of addiction.

World’s End

This multi generational novel ranges over the history of the Hudson River Valley from the late seventeenth cenutry to the late 1960s with low humor, high seriousness, and magical, almost hallucinatory prose. It follows the interwoven destinies of families of Indians, lordy Dutch patrons, and yoemen.

East Is East

A young Japanese seaman jumps ship off the coast of Georgia and washes ashore on a barrier island inhabited by a strange mix of rednecks, descendents of slaves, genteel retired people, and a colony of artists. The result is a sexy, savagely hilarious tragicomedy of thwarted expectations, mistaken identity, love, jealousy and betrayal. ‘An absolutely stunning work, full of brilliant cross cultural insights.’ The New York Times Book Review.

The Road to Wellville

An account of: Dr John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the cornflake and peanut butter; his profligate, degenerate and opportunistic son; and the birth of America’s first health fanatics. T. Correghessan Boyle is the author of ‘Water Music’, ‘Budding Prospects’ and ‘The Tortilla Curtain’.

The Tortilla Curtain

When Delaney Mossbacher knocks down a Mexican pedestrian, he neither reports the accident nor takes his victim to hospital. Instead the man accepts $20 and limps back to poverty and his pregnant 17 year old wife, leaving Delaney to return to his privileged life in California. But these two men are fated against each other, as Delaney attempts to clear the land of the illegal immigrants who he thinks are turning his state park into a ghetto, and a boiling pot of racism and prejudice threatens to spill over.

Riven Rock

In Riven Rock, his most fully realized and compassionate novel to date, T.C. Boyle transforms two characters straight out of history into rich mythic creations whose tortured love and epic story is intimate enough to break our hearts. These unforgettable characters invite the reader’s care as never before in a Boyle novel. With the scope of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Riven Rock uses real American subjects to come to terms with love and loss in the early years of our century. Boyle anchors his tale with the remarkable and courageous Katherine Dexter. Wed to Stanley McCormick thirty one year old son of the millionaire inventor of the Reaper, and a schizophrenic sexual maniac Katherine struggles to cure him while he is locked up in his Santa Barbara mansion and forbidden the mere sight of a women above all, his wife. Throughout her career as a scisntist ad suffragette, her faith never wavers: one day, one of the psychiatrists she finds for her husband will, she insists, return him to her, free of demons, a yearned for lover. ‘Still America’s most imaginative contemporary novelist’ Newsweek, Boyle weaves his hallmark virtuoso prose onto a recreation of America’s age of innocence against a backdrop of wealth and privilege. And at the center of Riven Rock are its people, somehow bound together in thier deep sense of fidelity to each other.

A Friend of the Earth

The bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain and Riven Rock takes a provocative new turn with a brilliant, timely, darkly funny novel about love, activism, and the future of the planetT. C. Boyle’s range as a novelist is breathtaking; he is the kind of writer who is always setting himself new challenges, who never ceases to astonish. In A Friend of the Earth, ‘America’s most imaginative contemporary novelist’Newsweek blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the ultimate questions of human love and the survival of the species. Friend of the Earth opens in the year 2025, as Tyrone O’Shaughnessy Tierwater ekes out a bleak living in southern California, managing a rock star’s private menagerie of the species ‘only a mother could love’ scruffy hyenas, jackals, warthogs, and three down at the mouth lions. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed in a grim but very funny way, and most of the major mammalian species not to mention fish, birds, and frogs are extinct. Once, as we see in alternating chapters that flash back to the last two decades of the twentieth century, Ty was so seriously committed to environmental causes that he became an ecoterrorist and convicted felon. A ‘a member of the radical environmental group Earth Forever!, he unwittingly endangered both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now, when he’s just trying to survive in a world torn by obdurate storms and winnowing drought, ”drea comes back into his life. What happens as the two slip into a reborn involvement makes for a gripping, topical, and ever surprising story that is certain to stir readers’ emotions. Gritty and surreal, frightening yet touching, A Friend of the Earth represents a high water mark in Boyle’s career his deep streak of social concern is effortlessly blended here with real compassion for his characters and the spirit of sheer exhilarating playfulness readers have come to expect of his work.

Drop City

T.C. Boyle has proven himself to be a master storyteller who can do just about anything. But even his most ardent admirers may be caught off guard by his ninth novel, for Boyle has delivered something completely unexpected: a serious and richly rewarding character study that is his most accomplished and deeply satisfying work to date. It is 1970, and a down at the heels California commune has decided to relocate to the last frontier the unforgiving landscape of interior Alaska in the ultimate expression of going back to the land. The novel opposes two groups of characters: Sess Harder, his wife Pamela, and other young Alaskans who are already homesteading in the wilderness and the brothers and sisters of Drop City, who, despite their devotion to peace, free love, and the simple life, find their commune riven by tensions. As these two communities collide, their alliances shift and unexpected friendships and dangerous enmities are born as everyone struggles with the bare essentials of life: love, nourishment, and a roof over one’s head. Drop City is not a satire or a nostalgic look at the sixties, though its evocation of the period is presented with a truth and clarity that no book on that era has achieved. This is a surprising book, a rich, allusive, and nonsentimental look at the ideals of a generation and their impact on today’s radically transformed world. Above all, it is a novel infused with the lyricism and take no prisoners storytelling for which T.C. Boyle is justly famous.

The Inner Circle

Fresh on the heels of his New York Times bestselling and National Book Award nominated novel, Drop City, T.C. Boyle has spun an even more dazzling tale that will delight both his longtime devotees and a legion of new fans. Boyle’s tenth novel, The Inner Circle has it all: fabulous characters, a rollicking plot, and more sex than pioneering researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey ever dreamed of documenting…
well, almost. A love story, The Inner Circle is narrated by John Milk, a virginal young man who in 1940 accepts a job as an assistant to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, an extraordinarily charming professor of zoology at Indiana University who has just discovered his life s true calling: sex. As a member of Kinsey s inner circle of researchers, Milk and his beautiful new wife is called on to participate in sexual experiments that become increasingly uninhibited and problematic for his marriage. For in his later years Kinsey who behind closed doors is a sexual enthusiast of the first order ever more recklessly pushed the boundaries both personally and professionally. While Boyle doesn t resist making the most of this delicious material, The Inner Circle is at heart a very moving and very loving look at sex, marriage, and jealousy that will have readers everywhere reas*sessing their own relationships because, in the end, love is all there is.

Talk Talk

The bestselling author of The Inner Circle and Drop City returns with a timely new novel about a woman in desperate pursuit of a man who has stolen her identity

The first time Bridger saw Dana she was dancing barefoot, her hair aflame in the red glow of the club, her body throbbing with rhythms and cross rhythms that only she could hear. He was mesmerized. That night they were both deaf, mouthing to each other over the booming bass. And it was not until their first date, after he had agonized over what CD to play in the car, that Bridger learned that her deafness was profound and permanent. By then, he was falling in love.

Now she is in a courtroom, her legs shackled, as a list of charges is read out. She is accused of assault with a deadly weapon, auto theft, and passing bad checks, among other things. Clearly there has been a terrible mistake. A man his name is William ‘Peck’ Wilson as Dana and Bridger eventually learn has been living a blameless life of criminal excess at Dana’s expense. And as Dana and Bridger set out to find him, they begin to test to its limits the life they have started to build together.

Talk Talk is both a thrilling road trip across America and a moving story about language, love, and identity from one of America s finest novelists.

The Women

A dazzling novel of Frank Lloyd Wright, told from the point of view of The Women in his life

Having brought to life eccentric cereal king John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle, T.C. Boyle now turns his fictional sights on an even more colorful and outlandish character: Frank Lloyd Wright. Boyle’s account of Wright s life, as told through the experiences of the four women who loved him, blazes with his trademark wit and invention. Wright s life was one long howling struggle against the bonds of convention, whether aesthetic, social, moral, or romantic. He never did what was expected and despite the overblown scandals surrounding his amours and very public divorces and the financial disarray that dogged him throughout his career, he never let anything get in the way of his larger than life appetites and visions. Wright s triumphs and defeats were always tied to The Women he loved: the Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff; the passionate Southern belle Maud Miriam Noel; the spirited Mamah Cheney, tragically killed; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin. In The Women, T.C. Boyle s protean voice captures these very different women and, in doing so, creates a masterful ode to the creative life in all its complexity and grandeur.

When the Killing’s Done

From the bestselling author of The Women comes an action packed adventure about endangered animals and those who would protect them. Principally set on the wild and sparsely inhabited Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, T. C. Boyle’s powerful new novel combines pulse pounding adventure with a socially conscious, richly humane tale regarding the dominion we attempt to exert, for better or worse, over the natural world. Alma Boyd Takesue is a National Park Service biologist who is spearheading the efforts to save the islands’ endangered native creatures from invasive species like rats and feral pigs, which, in her view, must be eliminated. Her antagonist, Dave LaJoy, is a dreadlocked local businessman who, along with his lover, the folksinger Anise Reed, is fiercely opposed to the killing of any species whatsoever and will go to any lengths to subvert the plans of Alma and her colleagues. Their confrontation plays out in a series of escalating scenes in which these characters violently confront one another, contemplate acts of sabotage, court danger, and tempt the awesome destructive power of nature itself. Boyle deepens his story by going back in time to relate the harrowing tale of Alma’s grandmother, Beverly, who was the sole survivor of a 1946 shipwreck in the channel, as well as the tragic story of Anise’s mother, Rita, who in the late 1970s lived and worked on a sheep ranch on Santa Cruz Island. In dramatizing this collision between protectors of the environment and animal rights activists, Boyle is, in his characteristic fashion, examining one of the essential questions of our time: Who has the right of possession of the land, the waters, the very lives of all the creatures who share this planet with us? When the Killing’s Done will offer no transparent answers, but like The Tortilla Curtain, Boyle’s classic take on illegal immigration, it will touch you deeply and put you in a position to decide.

Descent of Man

A mad, hilarious collection of short stories, wherein Boyle offers his unique view of dictators, animals, scientists, explorers, collectors, teetotalers, and others.

Greasy Lake

Mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, The Washington Post Book World says these masterful stories mark T. Coraghessan Boyle’s development from ‘a prodigy’s audacity to something that packs even more of a wallop: mature artistry.’ They cover everything, from a terrifying encounter between a bunch of suburban adolescents and a murderous, drug dealing biker, to a touching though doomed love affair between Eisenhower and Nina Khruschev.

If the River Was Whiskey

Eccentrics, charlatans, and decent, vulnerable people. You’ll find them all in this acclaimed collection of stories. From ‘Sorry Fugu,’ the tale of an improbable romance between a restaurateur and a food critic, to ‘The Little Chill,’ a chronicle of 60’s survivors in arrested development, these works are magical, surprising, haunting, and hilarious.

Without a Hero

The fourth, critically praised collection of short stories by the author of The Road to Wellville brings together fifteen darkly comic tales about human frailty, including the title story about an ill fated romance. NYT.

T. C. Boyle Stories

Twenty five years of dazzling short stories, including seven never before published in book form, from the bestselling author of Riven Rock and The Tortilla CurtainT. C. Boyle is one of the most inventive and wickedly funny short story writers at work today. Over the course of twenty five years, Boyle has built up a body of short fiction that is remarkable in its range, richness, and exuberance. His stories have won accolades for their irony and black humor, for their verbal pyrotechnics, for their fascination with everything bizarre and queasy, and for the razor sharp way in which they dissect America’s obsession with image and materialism. Gathered together here are all of the stories that have appeared in his four previous collections, as well as seven that have never before appeared in book form. Together they comprise a book of small treasures, a definitive gift for Boyle fans and for every reader ready to discover the ‘ferocious, delicious imagination’ Los Angeles Times Book Review of a ‘vibrant sensibility fully engaged with American society’ The New York Times.’700 flashy, inventive pages of stylistic and moral acrobatics.’ The New York Times Book Review’Varied, clever, and delightful…
these stories are consistent in their readability and quality.’ Chicago Tribune’Boyle sketches his characters with Swiftian good humor and crisp prose; in his best work he tempers his trademark irony with a trace of empathy.’ The New Yorker’He writes like a kid at a carnival, tossing off firecrackers of language that explode like Roman candles in our minds…
. In marking out a literary universe that is both diverse and remarkably consistent, the stories here…
add up to an oeuvre all their own.’ The Village Voice A New York Times Notable Book

After the Plague

Few authors in America write with such sheer love of story, language, and imagination as T. C. Boyle, and nowhere is that passion more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and widely praised short stories. In After the Plague, his sixth collection of stories, Boyle exhibits his maturing themes, speaking to contemporary social issues in a range of emotional keys. The sixteen stories gathered here, nine of which have appeared in The New Yorker and three in The O’Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories volumes, display Boyle’s astonishing range as he rings his changes on everything from air rage ‘Friendly Skies’ to abortion doctors ‘Killing Babies’. There are also stories of quiet passion here, such as ‘The Love of My Life,’ which deals with first love and its consequences, and ‘My Widow,’ a touching portrait of the writer’s own possible future. The collection ends with the brilliant title story, a whimsical and imaginative vision of a disease ravaged Earth and the few inheritors of a new Eden. Presented with characteristic wit and intelligence, these stories will delight readers in search of the latest news of the chaotic, disturbing, and achingly beautiful world in which we live.

The Human Fly

His many and varied novels are part of the American literary landscape but one of the best ways to appreciate T. C. Boyle is through his richly imagined short fiction. Boyle’s kaleidoscopic humor and wit, his keen, unforgiving take on American life, and his all too human protagonists all contibute to making his a unique voice. Here is a collection of classic Boyle stories about teenagers including the O. Henry Award winning ‘The Love of My Life’ that will speak directly to them, as well as to anyone who was once a teenager too.

Tooth and Claw

Since Descent of Man appeared in 1979, T. C. Boyle has transformed the nature of short fiction in our time; in a review of his most recent collection, After the Plague, The New York Times hailed him as ‘a writer who can take you anywhere.’ Which is exactly what Boyle does in Tooth and Claw. These fourteen stories, which have appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, Harper s, McSweeney s, and Playboy, display Boyle’s imaginative muscle, emotional sensitivity, and astonishing range. Here you will find the whimsical tales for which Boyle is famous, including ‘The Kind Assassin,’ about a radio shock jock who sets the world record for most continuous hours without sleep. Readers will love the comedic drama of the title story, about a man who must contend with a vicious cat from Africa that he has won in a bet. And who could resist the gripping power of ‘Dogology,’ about a woman who becomes so obsessed with man s best friend that she begins to lose her own identity to a pack of strays. Boyle here proves once again that he is ‘a writer who can take any topic and spin a yarn too good to put down’ Men s Journal.

Wild Child

A superb new collection from ‘a writer who can take you anywhere’ The New York Times 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, shocking, and ultimately gratifying his readers while at the same time testing his characters’ emotional and physical endurance. The fourteen stories gathered here display both Boyle’s astonishing range and his imaginative muscle. Nature is the dominant player in many of these stories, whether in the form of the catastrophic mudslide that allows a cynic to reclaim his own humanity ‘La Conchita’ or the wind driven fires that howl through a high California canyon ‘Ash Monday’. Other tales range from the drama of a man who spins Homeric lies in order to stop going to work, to that of a young woman who must babysit for a $250,000 cloned Afghan and the sad comedy of a child born to Mexican street vendors who is unable to feel pain. Brilliant, incisive, and always entertaining, Boyle’s short stories showcase the mischievous humor and socially conscious sensibility that have made him one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.

I’m with the Bears

A stellar line up of fiction writers envision the terrors of impending climate change. The size and severity of the global climate crisis is such that even the most committed environmentalists are liable to live in a state of denial. The award winning writers collected here have made it their task to shake off this nagging disbelief, bringing the incomprehensible within our grasp and shaping an emotional response to the deterioration of our global habitat. From T. C. Boyle’s account of early eco activists, to Nathaniel Rich s vision of a near future where oil sells for $800 a barrel these ten provocative, occasionally chilling, sometimes satirical stories bring a human reality to disasters of inhuman proportions. Royalties from I m With the Bears will go to 350. org, an international grassroots movement working to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.