A second volume of short fiction—featuring fourteen
uncollected stories—from the bestselling author and master
of the form
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unpublished in book form as well as a preface in which Boyle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 II is a grand career statement from a
writer whose imagination knows no bounds.
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