The second volume of collected short fiction from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain, featuring fifty-eight short stories that “mix brilliance with high-concept pyrotechnics” (Los Angeles Times), including fourteen never-before-published tales
“Whether he’s writing about survival in a wasted environment or people and animals coming unhinged, Boyle never fails to captivate, to deliver his ideas within the conveyance of first-class storytelling.”—San Francisco Chronicle
By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, T.C. Boyle’s stories map a wide range of human emotions. The fifty-eight stories in this volume, gathered from Wild Child, Tooth and Claw, and After the Plague, plus fourteen marvelous new tales, reflect his mordant wit, emotional power, and exquisite prose.
Along with the satires and tall tales that established his reputation, T.C. Boyle Stories II includes 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.
Boyle engagingly tests his characters’ emotional and physical endurance, whether 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.
T.C. Boyle Stories II is a grand career statement from a writer whose creativity knows no bounds.
