T. C. Boyle

Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author T.C. Boyle makes his Ecco debut with a powerful, gripping novel that explores the roots of violence and anti-authoritarianism inherent in the American character.Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people--an aging ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son's paranoid, much older lover--as they careen towards an explosive confrontation.On a vacation cruise to Central America with his wife, seventy-year-old Sten Stensen unflinchingly kills a gun-wielding robber menacing a busload of senior tourists. The reluctant hero is relieved to return home to Fort Bragg, California, after the ordeal--only to find that his delusional son, Adam, has spiraled out of control.Adam has become involved with Sara Hovarty Jennings, a hardened member of the Sovereign Citizens' Movement, right-wing anarchists who refuse to acknowledge the laws and regulations of the state, considering them to be false and non-applicable. Adam's senior by some fifteen years, Sara becomes his protector and inamorata. As Adam's mental state fractures, he becomes increasingly schizophrenic--a breakdown that leads him to shoot two people in separate instances. On the run, he takes to the woods, spurring the biggest manhunt in California history.As he explores a father's legacy of violence and his powerlessness in relating to his equally violent son, T. C. Boyle offers unparalleled psychological insights into the American psyche. Inspired by a true story, The Harder They Come is a devastating and indelible novel from a modern master.

Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author T.C. Boyle makes his Ecco debut with a powerful, gripping novel that explores the roots of violence and anti-authoritarianism inherent in the American character.Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people--an aging ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son's paranoid, much older lover--as they careen towards an explosive confrontation.On a vacation cruise to Central America with his wife, seventy-year-old Sten Stensen unflinchingly kills a gun-wielding robber menacing a busload of senior tourists. The reluctant hero is relieved to return home to Fort Bragg, California, after the ordeal--only to find that his delusional son, Adam, has spiraled out of control.Adam has become involved with Sara Hovarty Jennings, a hardened member of the Sovereign Citizens' Movement, right-wing anarchists who refuse to acknowledge the laws and regulations of the state, considering them to be false and non-applicable. Adam's senior by some fifteen years, Sara becomes his protector and inamorata. As Adam's mental state fractures, he becomes increasingly schizophrenic--a breakdown that leads him to shoot two people in separate instances. On the run, he takes to the woods, spurring the biggest manhunt in California history.As he explores a father's legacy of violence and his powerlessness in relating to his equally violent son, T. C. Boyle offers unparalleled psychological insights into the American psyche. Inspired by a true story, The Harder They Come is a devastating and indelible novel from a modern master.

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.

A man falls from a roof whilst spying on his beautiful widowed neighbour. A newly married couple seeking enlightenment take a three year vow of silence and move to a yurt in the Arizona desert. A handsome young man works in real-estate by day, but has a far more sinister profession by night. An elderly woman is determined to return to her home in the countryside, despite the knowledge that in doing so she may be signing her own death warrant. Giant men are kept in cages to ensure their nightly service to their country. A man develops an unhealthy interest in his recently deceased reclusive rock-star neighbour. And on Christmas day at the San Francisco Zoo a terrible and tragic event occurs...T.C. Boyle Stories II comprises three later volumes of short fiction - After the Plague, Tooth and Claw and Wild Child - along with a new collection, A Death in Kitchawank. These fifty-eight stories explore the mundane, the devastating, the figurative and the implausible in a masterful and enthralling collection. T.C. Boyle is a writer at the height of his craft.

The schooner from Santa Barbara arrives at the tiny, desolate island on New Year's Day, 1888. As the trunks are unloaded onto the wet sand, thirty-eight-year-old Marantha Waters looks at the cliffs falling away into the churning sea. This is the first day of her new life on San Miguel. Joined by her husband, a fiercely possessive Civil War veteran who will take over the operation of the sheep ranch on the island, Marantha strives to persevere in the face of brutal isolation. But the constant wind and sheep-ravaged wasteland shatter her illusions; her husband promised paradise. As he obsessively resolves to stay - and becomes increasingly distant from her and their adopted daughter Edith - Marantha's blighted lungs grow weaker in the dampness. Two years later, Edith, now a spirited teenager and an aspiring actress, will exploit every opportunity to escape the captivity her father has imposed on her. March, 1930. Another family - and another bride - arrives on San Miguel. Elise Lester, a librarian from New York City, and her husband Herbie, a World War I veteran full of manic energy, achieve a celebrity of sorts as the news cameras take an interest in these wayward people living in the wild. But the unyielding island is haunted by its history. Will the family be able to cling together as the war threatens to pull everything apart?San Miguel is a vivid and gripping story of hard lives pitched against the elements, the desires of stubborn men and the unbearable burden of love, from master American storyteller T. C. Boyle.

The island of Anacapa, off the coast of California, is overrun with black rats which are threatening the ancient population of ground-nesting birds. Alma Boyd Takesue of the National Park Service is campaigning to exterminate them once and for all, but her systematic plan is in danger of sabotage by two notorious environmental activists, Anise Reed and Dave LaJoy. But when Alma's sights turn to the infestation of non-native pigs on the island of Santa Cruz - where Anise was brought up by her rancher mother - the stakes are raised and the debate threatens to boil over into something much more real...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - In this "terrifically exciting and unapologetically relevant" (The Washington Post) novel from the award-winning author of The Tortilla Curtain, two activists clash in their attempts to preserve the environment. "A smart and rollicking novel, with suspense and shipwrecks galore . . . Character, science, and history co-evolve marvelously here in a tale of fanaticism gone literally overboard."--Barbara Kingsolver, The New York Times Book Review Alma Boyd Takesue is a National Park Service biologist who is spearheading the efforts to save the endangered native creatures of California's Channel Islands from invasive species such as rats and feral pigs. Her antagonist, Dave LaJoy, is a local businessman who is fiercely opposed to the killing of any animals and will go to any lengths to subvert Alma's plans. As their confrontation plays out in a series of scenes escalating in violence, drama, and danger, When the Killing's Done deftly relates a richly humane tale about the dominion we attempt to exert, for better or worse, over the natural world.

A feral boy is captured and ‘civilised' in the Languedoc region. A young woman is hired to look after a cloned dog that cost its owners $250,000. A widower in a self-satisfied suburb engulfs his loneliness in a sea of rats. A weary city GP is baffled by a Mexican boy, the son of a taco-seller, who can feel no pain. A junior film editor invents the death of his own daughter because he can't face going in to work. A vindictive teenager with a gasoline fixation runs into trouble with his Japanese neighbour. Two washed-up crooners in 1950s New York get creative while recording a schmaltzy Christmas special. In this beguiling new collection of stories, T. C. Boyle, one of the world's greatest storytellers, explores the improbable, the tragic, the allegorical and the altogether ordinary.

Fourteen "exhilarating" (The Boston Globe) stories that explore "the delicate balance between nature and civilization" (San Francisco Chronicle), from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain " A] rollicking collection of . . . good, old-fashioned, funny-suspenseful-head shaking stories."--The New York Times (Best Books of the Year) There may be no one better than T.C. Boyle at engaging, shocking, and ultimately gratifying readers while at the same time testing his characters' emotional and physical endurance. From "Wild Child," a retelling of the story of Victor, the feral boy who was captured running naked through the forests of Napoleonic France, to "La Conchita," the tale of a catastrophic mudslide that allows a cynic to reclaim his own humanity, these tales are by turns magical and moving, showcasing the mischievous humor and socially conscious sensibility that have made Boyle one of the foremost masters of the short story.

Welcome to the troubled, tempestuous world of Frank Lloyd Wright. Scandalous affairs rage behind closed doors, broken hearts are tossed aside, fires rip through the wings of the house and paparazzi lie in wait outside the front door for the latest tragedy in this never-ending saga. This is the home of the great architect of the twentieth century, a man of extremes in both his work and his private life: at once a force of nature and an avalanche of need and emotion that sweeps aside everything in its path. Sharp, savage and subtle in equal measure, "The Women" plumbs the chaos, horrors and uncontainable passions of a formidable American icon.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A "riveting" (The Wall Street Journal) and "wonderfully entertaining" (The Boston Globe) account of Frank Lloyd Wright's life, told through the experiences of the four women who loved him. "Boyle handles the big themes--Wright the genius battling an uncomprehending, philistine world and Wright the man loving and loathing his women--with extraordinary brio."--San Francisco Chronicle Is it easy to live with a genius? Frank Lloyd 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 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: Olgivanna Milanoff, an imperious Montenegrin beauty who was a student of the Russian mystic Gurdjieff and was known by Wright's apprentices as "the Dragon Lady"; Maude Miriam Noel, a passionate Southern belle with a mean temper and a fondness for morphine; the spirited Mamah Borthwick Cheney, tragically murdered at Wright's Wisconsin estate, Taliesin, in 1914; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin, with whom he had six children. T.C. Boyle deftly captures these very different women and, in doing so, creates a sexy, gripping drama about marriage, the bargains men and women make, and the privileges and pitfalls of genius and fame.

The Secret Is Out Exploring an alternate history of science fiction, this ingenious anthology showcases eighteen brilliant authors leading the way to a new literature of the future. These award-winning stories defy trends, cross genres, and prove that great fiction cannot be categorized. Two strangely detached astronauts orbit Earth while a third world war rages on. A primatologist's lover suspects her of obsession with one of her simian charges. The horrors of trench warfare dovetail with the theoretical workings of black holes. A dissolving marriage and bitter custody dispute are overshadowed by the arrival of time travelers. An astonishing invention that records the sense of touch is far too dangerous for Thomas Edison to reveal. The future is here. Read it.

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.

This new collection of short stories from T. C. Boyle finds him at his mercurial best. Inventive, wickedly funny, sometimes disturbing, these are stories about drop-outs, deadbeats, and kooks. Take the man who shares his apartment with a wildcat won in a drunken bet; the drive-time shock jock hallucinating from sleep deprivation for a publicity stunt; the suburban woman who joins a pack of dogs, eating rabbits and baying at the moon. With a unique deftness of touch and a keen eye for the telling detail, Boyle has mapped the strange underworld of America.

A "fierce and] funny" (Entertainment Weekly) collection of fourteen stories exploring humanity's wild side, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain "Whether Boyle is breaking your heart or making you laugh, you just don't care because he is so darned good at it."--San Francisco Chronicle The fourteen stories gathered here display Boyle's imaginative muscle, emotional sensitivity, and astonishing range. There are whimsical tales, including "Swept Away," which tells of a female ornithologist who falls in love on the blustery island of Unst, and "The Kind Assassin," about a bored and loveless radio shock jock who sets the world record for most continuous hours without sleep--and who may never sleep again. In the title story, a young man must contend with a vicious feral cat from Africa that he won in a bar bet. And in "Dogology," a young woman in suburban New England becomes so obsessed with man's best friend that she begins to lose her own identity to a pack of strays. Muscular, provocative, and blurring the boundaries between humans and nature, the funny and the shocking, Tooth and Claw is Boyle at his best.

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 na ve 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.

The sixth collection of short stories by the award-winning author of World's End displays his remarkable gift for storytelling as well as his wide-ranging interests in everything from abortion doctors to air rage. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.

This is a collection of short stories, from surrealism to satire, from the psychological to the slapstick.