Best Selling Books by T. Coraghessan Boyle

A quarter century of stories, including new gems, from the author of the nationally bestselling "Riven Rock".

T.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 & satire in a story that addresses the ultimate questions of human love & the survival of the species. A 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, & three down-at-the-mouth lions. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed in a grim but very funny way, & most of the major mammalian species--not to mention fish, birds, & 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 & convicted felon. As a member of the radical environmental group Earth Forever!, he unwittingly endangered both his daughter, Sierra, & his wife, Andrea. Now, when he''s just trying to survive in a world torn by obdurate storms & winnowing drought, Andrea comes back into his life. What happens as the two slip into a reborn involvement makes for a gripping, topical, & ever-surprising story that is certain to stir readers'' emotions. Gritty & 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 & the spirit of sheer exhilarating playfulness readers have come to expect of his work.

A tale inspired by the life of Frank Lloyd Wright is presented from the perspectives of four very different women who loved him and offers insight into the eminent architect''s enduring struggles against conventional boundaries. 75,000 first printing.

The author''s sixth collection of short stories displays his wide-ranging interests in everything from abortion doctors to air rage.

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. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

From the "New York Times"-bestselling author of "The Women," a historical novel about three women''s lives on a California island. Their extraordinary stories, full of struggle and hope, are the subject of Boyle''s haunting new novel.

Stunning thriller from this masterful American writer

The lives of two different couples--wealthy Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher, and Candido and America Rincon, a pair of Mexican illegals--suddenly collide, in a story that unfolds from the shifting viewpoints of the various characters.

Will Lightbody is a man with a stomach ailment whose only sin is loving his wife, Eleanor, too much. Eleanor is a health nut of the first stripe, and when in 1907 she journeys to Dr. John Harvey Kellogg''s infamous Battle Creek Spa to live out the vegetarian ethos, poor Will goes too. So begins T. Coraghessan Boyle''s wickedly comic look at turn-of-the-century fanatics in search of the magic pill to prolong their lives--or the profit to be had from manufacturing it. Brimming with a Dickensian cast of characters and laced with wildly wonderful plot twists, Jane Smiley in the New York Times Book Review called The Road to Wellville "A marvel, enjoyable from beginning to end."

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 Khrushchev. "Boyle is in absolute command," says The Detroit News, "wholly at home and always funny." Book jacket.

Fifteen satirical stories from a master of the art. In the title story a yuppie tries to impress a Russian immigrant with the consumer culture and finds himself outdone, "Big Game," is about a phony game ranch in California, and in "Carnal Knowledge," a woman convinces a man to liberate a turkey for Thanksgiving.

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.

A virginal man with a beautiful wife accepts a job as an assistant to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a charming professor whose life''s calling is sex.

Traces an incrementally violent confrontation between a National Park Service biologist who would eradicate invasive wildlife on the Channel Islands and two locals who are fiercely opposed to the killing of any creatures. By the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of World''s End. 75,000 first printing.

Sealed inside a glass enclosure designed as a prototype for a possible off-Earth colony, eight Terranauts in the 1990s Arizona desert test their skills in five biome environments that they must protect from skeptics who would sabotage the mission.

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.

T. 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). Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

From best-selling novelist T. C. Boyle, a satirical yet ultimately moving send-up of contemporary American life in the glare of climate change. "Boyle has long been one of the most exciting and intelligent storytellers in the United States." --Ron Charles, Washington Post

Since Descent of Manappeared 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 Timeshailed 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).

How far would you go to save someone you love? And what if that someone was ... not exactly human? Guy Schermerhorn, brilliant young professor of psychology and disciple of the pioneering Dr Moncrieff, is making a name for himself on the talk show circuit with an unusual protege in tow: a chimp by the name of Sam. Sam lives in Guy''s apartment, wears diapers and neckties, devours pizza and Macdonalds - and, through Guy''s careful training, can communicate through sign language. But living with Sam is wreaking havoc on Guy''s personal life, and when shy, meek undergraduate Aimee Villard volunteers to take on babysitting for him, he can''t believe his luck. Aimee and Sam have an immediate rapport, and before Guy knows it she''s moved in, proudly devoting herself to Sam''s care and Guy''s project. Aimee has never known purpose and happiness like this; but when Guy''s funding is imperilled, and Sam is taken away by the sinister Moncrief, her world falls apart. Aimee discovers just how far she''ll go to, and just what she''ll risk, to be united with the chimp she''s come to love so much.

In 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. Wed to Stanley McCormick, a schizophrenic sexual maniac, Katherine Dexter struggles to cure him while he is locked up in his Santa Barbara mansion and forbidden the mere sight of a woman--above all, his wife.

Presents a selection of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.

Mungo Park, based on a real-life African explorer, and Ned Rise, a scoundrel, pimp, thief, and cheat, travel about Africa and meet up with a varied assortment of characters--native and colonial, antic and dangerous.