New Releases by T.C. Boyle

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain comes “a tense thriller” (San Francisco) about a woman in desperate pursuit of the man who has stolen her identity. “Boyle takes the reader on a wild ride. . . . No one writes better about the wages of American sin.”—The New York Times Book Review There’s more than one way to take a life . . . It was not until their first date that Bridger Martin learned that Dana Halter’s deafness was profound and permanent. By then he was falling in love. Now she is in a courtroom, accused of assault with a deadly weapon, auto theft, and passing bad checks, among other things. As Dana and Bridger eventually learn, William “Peck” Wilson has stolen Dana’s identity and has been living a blameless life of criminal excess at her expense. And as they set out to find him, they began to test to its very limits the life they have begun to build together. Both a suspenseful chase across America and a moving story about language, love, and identity, Talk Talk is a masterful, mind-bending novel from one of America’s most versatile and entertaining writers.

New York Times bestselling author T.C. Boyle speaks to a brand-new audience in this anthology of his classic, richly imagined short fiction about teenagers. His many, 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 combine to make his a singular 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. Includes the previously uncollected story, "Almost Shooting an Elephant." "Boyle repeatedly demonstrates his masterful grasp of human nature, exposing his characters'' foibles and eccentricities."—Publishers Weekly

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the award–winning author of The Tortilla Curtain comes “a fascinating, fictional rendering of what life might have been like doing research for infamous sex professor Alfred Kinsey” (Chicago Tribune). “A biting satire of emotional manipulation, sexual indiscretion, and scientific hubris.”—The Boston Globe A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune In 1940, John Milk, a virginal young man, accepts a job as an assistant to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, and 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 are 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. At heart a moving and compassionate look at sex, marriage, jealousy, and infidelity, The Inner Circle makes use of Alfred Kinsey’s controversial studies on human sexuality to create an irresistible tale about the interaction between our human and animal natures.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • From the award–winning author of The Tortilla Curtain comes a “gorgeously crafted epic” (People) about a band of hippies who attempt to establish themselves deep in the wilderness of Alaska. “Not only an entertaining romp through the madness of the countercultural ’70s, but a stirring parable about the American dream as well.”—The New York Times It is 1970, and a down-at-the-heels California commune devoted to peace, free love, and the simple life has decided to relocate to the last frontier—the unforgiving landscape of interior Alaska—in the ultimate expression of going back to the land. Armed with the spirit of adventure and naïve optimism, the inhabitants of “Drop City” arrive in the wilderness of Alaska only to find their utopia already populated by other young homesteaders. When the two communities collide, 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 a surprising story that reveals human behavior at its rawest, most tender, and most compelling. It is also a rich, allusive, and unsentimental look at the ideals of a generation and their impact on today’s radically transformed world. Above all, it’s an epic and gripping novel infused with the lyricism and take-no-prisoners storytelling for which T.C. Boyle is justly famous.

Sixteen “uproarious and unforgiving” (The New Yorker) short stories from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain “In an age of war where the foe is indistinct and difficult to identify, Boyle has become both the poet and the prophet of our time.”—Los Angeles Times Throughout his literary career, T.C. Boyle, one of the acknowledged masters of the short story, has refined his inventive, modern, and wickedly witty style. These sixteen stories—nine of which have appeared in The New Yorker—address an amazing array of subjects in a range of emotional keys. Some tap today’s headline news, from air range (“Friendly Skies”) to abortion doctors (“Killing Babies”), while others explore timeless themes, from first love and its consequences (“The Love of My Life”) to confrontations with mortality (“Rust”). Combining joy and humor with the dark, intense scenarios that have earned Boyle national acclaim, After the Plague is a gripping ride through narratives that shock, compel, and entertain.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • The first volume of collected short fiction from the award–winning author of The Tortilla Curtain, featuring sixty-eight “varied, clever, and delightful” (The Chicago Tribune) short stories, including seven never-before-published tales “Each [story hops] with manic energy . . . at his vaulting, imaginative best Boyle suggests the bastard child of Flannery O’Connor and Monty Python.”—The Miami Herald WINNER OF THE PEN/MALAMUD AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE PEN CENTER/USA WEST LITERARY AWARD By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, T.C. Boyle’s stories map a wide geography of human emotions. Whether he is writing about eccentrics, charlatans, or exotic seekers after the truth, or about decent vulnerable people trying to forge some kind of connection in an unfriendly world, the effect is always surprising and uniquely his own. Running throughout is Boyle’s razor-sharp sense of humor, and his singular genius for dissecting America’s obsession with image and materialism. Drawn from Descent of Man, Greasy Lake, If the River Was Whiskey, and Without a Hero alongside seven new tales, the sixty-eight stories in this volume are remarkable in their range, richness, and exuberance. T.C. Boyle Stories is 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).

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “A flamboyant meditation on love in all of its absurdity and all its undeniability” (The Mercury News) set during America’s age of innocence—and against a backdrop of wealth and privilege—from the award–winning author of The Tortilla Curtain “As romantic as it is informative, as colorful as it is convincing. Boyle combines his gift for historical re-creation with his dazzling powers as a storyteller.”—The Boston Globe It is the dawn of the twentieth century when the beautiful, budding feminist Katherine Dexter falls in love with Stanley McCormick, son of a millionaire inventor. The two wed, but before the marriage is consummated, Stanley experiences a nervous breakdown and is diagnosed as a schizophrenic sex maniac. Stanley is locked up in his family’s Santa Barbara mansion and forbidden the mere sight of women—above all, his wife. Throughout her career as a scientist and a suffragette, Katherine’s faith never waiters: that, one day, one of the many psychiatrists she hires to try to cure her husband will free him of his demons. Blending social history with some of the most deliciously dark humor ever written, T.C. Boyle employs his hallmark virtuoso prose to tell the story of a love affair that is as extraordinary as it is unforgettable.

T.C. Boyle’s “irresistible” (Entertainment Weekly) classic bestseller, a tragicomic novel about assimilation, immigration, and the price of the American dream “A masterpiece of contemporary social satire.” —The Wall Street Journal WINNER OF THE PRIX MÉDICIS ÉTRANGER Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Undocumented immigrants Cándido and América Rincón desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings Cándido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a dramatic comedy of error and prejudice.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • From the award–winning author of The Tortilla Curtain comes fifteen “gloriously comic . . . stories [that] are more than funny, better than wicked” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). “Fifteen sterling tales marked . . . by a keen sense of the absurd and a . . . compassionate awareness of human frailty.”—The Washington Post The stunning stories in Without a Hero each, in their own way, display a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America. T.C. Boyle takes chance after chance, even to the point of reexamining the ethos of Ernest Hemingway. In “Big Game,” the wild animal safari takes place not in Africa but on a pay-per-shoot ranch in Southern California and includes an elephant hunt and its vivid consequences. Boyle displays an astonishing range as he zooms in on such American specimens as the college football player who knows only defeat; the entrepreneur who creates a center for acquisitive disorders; the couple in search of the last toads on earth; and the boy caught between the ingenuousness of childhood and the cynicism of adulthood in “The Fog Man.” In some of these stories, Boyle makes you laugh out loud; in others, you come closer to understanding the human condition because of the way he cuts to the secret places in his peoples’ hearts.

In this “wildly funny” (People) novel, an eccentric cast of characters navigates a world obsessed with health and longevity—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain. “Boyle’s send-up of dietary fanaticism cleverly reminds us of the extremes to which Americans will go in pursuit of perfection.”—Glamour The year is 1907, and the boom town of Battle Creek, Michigan, is attracting a formidable array of visitors—the rich, the preposterously rich, and the merely famous, from California, Chicago, New York, and even Europe. What draws them to this place? And what inspires them to trade in their steaks and oysters, their martinis and champagne, for a diet of bran and yogurt and a regimen of five enemas a day? Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of course, inventor of the corn flake, peanut butter, and the coffee substitutes that have ruined so many a bright morning. Will Lightbody is a man with an undiagnosed stomach ailment whose only sin is loving his wife too much. Eleanor Lightbody, despite her upper-crust credentials, her capability and beauty, is a health nut of the first stripe—and when she journeys to Dr. Kellogg’s infamous Battle Creek Spa to live out the vegetarian ethos, poor Will goes too. Wickedly comedic, The Road to Wellville overflows with a Dickensian cast of characters—all in search of the magic pill to prolong their lives, or the profit to be had from manufacturing it.

Seventeen short stories from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain, “the sort of writer who inspires even poker-faced writers to grin and start dusting off their superlatives” (The Washington Post Book World). “Descent of Man is loaded with energetic language. . . . Boyle is capable of the sublime.”—The New York Times Book Review In seventeen slices of life that defy the expected and launch us into the absurd, T.C. Boyle offers his unique view of the world. A primate-center researcher becomes romantically involved with a chimp; a Norse poet overcomes bard-block; collectors compete to snare the ancient Aztec beer can, Quetzalcóatl Lite; and Lassie abandons Timmy for a randy coyote. Dark humor, delirious fantasy, and surreal satire come together in this collection that brilliantly expresses just what the “evolution” of mankind has wrought.

An “irresistible” (Los Angeles Times), “riotous” (The Seattle Times) novel about the adventures of three men growing marijuana in Northern California, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain “Consistently, effortlessly, intelligently funny.”—The New York Times All Felix Nasmyth and friends have to do is harvest a crop of Cannabis sativa and half a million tax-free dollars will be theirs. But they haven’t reckoned on nosy Northern California–style neighbors, torrential rain, demands of the flesh, and Felix’s improbable new love, a wayward sculptress on whose behalf he undertakes a one-man vendetta against a drug-busting state trooper named Jerpbak. As their deal escalates through crises into nightmare, their dreams of easy money get nipped in the bud.

In sixteen stories, T.C. Boyle tears through the walls of contemporary society to reveal a world at once comic and tragic, droll and horrific. Boyle introduces us to a death-defying stuntman who rides across the country strapped to the axle of a Peterbilt, and to a retired primatologist who can’t adjust to the “civilized” world. He chronicles the state of romance that requires full-body protection in a disease-conscious age and depicts with aching tenderness the relationship between a young boy and his alcoholic father. These magical and provocative stories mark yet another virtuoso performance from one of America’s most supple and electric literary inventors.

Mythic and realist, farcical and tragic, these fifteen “fables of contemporary life [are] so funny and acutely observed that they might have been written [for] Saturday Night Live” (The New York Times)—from the award–winning author of The Tortilla Curtain. “Boyle . . . owns a ferocious, delicious imagination, often darkly satirical and always infatuated with language.”—The Los Angeles Times Book Review In “The Hector Quesadilla Story,” T.C. Boyle writes of an aging Latin ballplayer, long past his best stuff, who on his birthday is put into an endless rotation in a game that goes on forever; in “All Shook Up,” he tells of the doomed affair between his narrator and the sweet, feckless wife of an aspiring Elvis Presley look-alike; in “On for the Long Haul,” he describes the grim scenarios enacted by a credulous survivalist and his family in their nuclear-holocaust-proof haven in the sticks; and in the title story, he portrays a terrifying and violent encounter between a bunch of late-adolescent layabouts and a murderous drug-dealing biker.