Skinny, earringed, satanically goateed, T. Coraghessan Boyle is the trickster figure of American letters. Part court jester, part holy fool, he slips in and out of various narrative disguises as it suits him. Nowhere is this more evident than in his short fiction, in which he bounces from psychological naturalism to giddy slapstick, dreamy surrealism to biting satire--sometimes within the space of a single tale. The sprawling and idiosyncratic T.C. Boyle Stories brings together his four previous volumes of short fiction, Descent of Man (1979), Greasy Lake (1985), If the River Was Whiskey (1989), and Without a Hero (1994), as well as seven previously uncollected stories, two of which have never before seen print. In both range and sheer heft, it's a remarkable collection, the more so since it represents an artist only midway through his career.

These stories find Boyle partying like it's 1999. He zeroes in on our age's most uncomfortable obsessions, its late-capitalist fetishes and millenarian fears: nervous Los Angelenos suckered into buying a Montana survivalist's retreat ("On for the Long Haul"); a hygienically obsessed girlfriend who insists on wearing a full-body condom ("Modern Love"); a rich, guilty couple suffocating under the weight of a lifetime's possessions ("Filthy with Things"). Elsewhere, he updates Gogol for late Soviet times ("The Overcoat II"), retells the death of blues god Robert Johnson ("Hellhound on My Trail"), even goes clubbing with that hot '90s property, the author of Mansfield Park ("I Dated Jane Austen"). Boyle's comic range is unparalleled, his timing razor-sharp as he skewers everyone from burglar alarm salesmen to the Beats. Like all tricksters, the author uses our own vanity and hypocrisy against us--but with barbs as witty as those found in T.C. Boyle Stories, not even his victims will mind. --Mary Park


From Publishers Weekly
A premier practitioner of short fiction, Boyle (Water Music) gathers two decades worth of work in one volume of almost 70 stories, adding seven pieces (three previously unpublished) to the contents of his previous four collections. The entries are organized thematically, evenly divided among "Love," "Death" and "And Everything In Between"; thus chronology is jumbled and early pieces flank more recent ones. The "Love" stories are so polished and sophisticated they all but glitter. In them, very often a hapless male, modestly hoping merely to get laid, encounters an obsessed woman and finds himself eventually undone. Sex itself is not especially important to Boyle, but obsession is. Obsessions of one sort or another (animal activism, germophobia, Elvis, frogs, squirrels, whales) inform these stories, which sparkle with wicked wit and exuberant prose. The last "Love" story serves as a sad transition to the tales of "Death." "Juliana Cloth" chronicles the way a sexually transmitted virus decimates an African town, and a girl goesAknowinglyAto an embrace that will kill her. The cumulative effect of the "Death" section, though, is numbing, repetitiously grotesque and finally gratuitous. However, the collection's texture quickens in the last section, "And Everything In Between," a potpourri of chilling fables. Throughout Boyle's work, real people (Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Carry Nation, Robert Johnson, Mao, Jack Kerouac, Jacques Cousteau) appear in narrative out-takes that are invariably amusing and, like Boyle's more serious work, mordant, worldly and irreverent. Author tour. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This retrospective collection assembles all the short fiction of California postmodernist Boyle, including some early magazine work that has not previously appeared in book form. The tales are arranged thematically instead of chronologically, in three broad categories: "Love," "Death," and "And Everything in Between." Most are lightweight riffs on pop culture icons in the tradition of Max Apple's The Oranging of America (1976). In "I Dated Jane Austen," from 1977, the tee-shirted narrator chauffeurs Miss Austen to a punk club in his Alfa Romeo. "Beat" (1993) imagines Jack Kerouac and his mother sharing a bottle of Mogen David wine and listening to Bing Crosby records on Christmas Eve, 1958. "The Rapture of the Deep" (1995) is the story of Jacques Cousteau's mutinous galley chef. Boyle works in the self-consciously hip, name-dropping style of Jay Leyner and stand-up comedian Dennis Miller. Unfortunately, the thematic grouping used in his anthology emphasizes the formulaic aspects of Boyle's fiction and makes its manic inventiveness seem forced and predictable. Libraries with any of Boyle's earlier story collections can skip this one.-?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Jim Shepard
The fact that I've just negotiated almost 700 pages of T.C. Boyle's short fiction ... and I'm not sick to death of it attests to its overall inventiveness, flash and just plain entertainment value.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Herbert Gold
[Boyle is] a writer born to elegance and equipped with keen eyes, ears and a preternatural skill at evoking the objects of his roving interest.


From Booklist
Boyle fans will be delighted by the release of this collection of 68 short stories, spanning a period of more than 20 years and including all stories published in previous collections as well as 4 stories not previously published in book form and 3 stories not previously published at all. For those not yet introduced to Boyle, or readers whose interest has been piqued by the recent success of The Road to Wellville (1993) and Riven Rock , there is plenty of variety in this collection, showcasing the wide range of Boyle's imaginative dexterity. Always entertaining, often provocative, Boyle's work combines verbal athleticism and comedic insight to illuminate the darkest corners of the human psyche. The stories are arranged in three broad sections: "Love," "Death," and "Everything in Between," with much unavoidable overlap among the categories. Of the three previously unpublished stories, "Little Fur People" pits an old woman's caring for sick and injured squirrels against the long arm of the same body that sanctions "no bag limit" killing of the creatures--in season with a valid license, of course; mutinous culinary frustration, as only the French could feel it, erupts among the crew aboard the Calypso in response to Jacques Cousteau's unceasing compulsion to dive deeper in "The Rapture of the Deep"; and the awkward romantic adventures of an American tourist are set in the vacation backdrop of "Mexico." Terrific storytelling and amazing artistry throughout. Grace Fill


From Kirkus Reviews
A fine, fat gathering of 68 stories, including the contents of Boyle's four collections (Without a Hero, 1994, etc.), four more, uncollected, tales, and three previously unpublished. The pieces are grouped thematically, under the conveniently broad headings ``Love,'' ``Death,'' and - And Everything in Between.'' Even this organizing device carries a whiff of Boyle's ironic sensibility and bold, resonant voice. He's a satirist, of course, with a deadly eye for faddishness and pretension, but he's primarily an inventor whose outrageous narrative premises pay homage to the spirit of Groucho Marx and the examples of such predecessors as the British fantasist John Collier and our own Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover. The volume begins with ``Modern Love,'' Boyle's triumphantly wry take on contemporary sexual timidity, and ends just as enjoyably with his loopy burlesque of conspicuous consumption and suburban guilt, ``Filthy with Things.'' Along the way, it's fun to re-encounter his mischievous revisionist portrayals of well-known figures: Dwight Eisenhower fixated on Mrs. Khrushchev (``Ike and Nina''); a retrograde Lassie (``Heart of a Champion''); Mao-Tse-tung in fine physical fettle (``The Second Swimming''); and Carry Nation in full eruption (``John Barleycorn Lives''). There are also acute comic distortions of politics (``The New Moon Party''), pop culture (``All Shook Up''), the sex wars (``A Woman's Restaurant''), and science and technology run amok (``Descent of Man,'' ``De Rerum Natura'') - as well as pitch-perfect homages to Kafka (``The Fog Man''), Hemingway (``Robert Jordan in Nicaragua''), and Gogol (``The Overcoat II''). Of the newer stories, ``I Dated Jane Austen'' is in Boyle's best gently mock-heroic vein, and ``Little Fur People'' observes with bemused tenderness a spinster's passion to save her beloved ``pet'' squirrels. Boyle is of course too young for a summing-up, but this seems as good a time as any for a mid-career display of the antic wares of our most versatile and prolific radical comedian. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
Twenty-five years of dazzling short stories, including seven never before published in book form, from the bestselling author of Riven Rock and The Tortilla Curtain

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).

"700 flashy, inventive pages of stylistic and moral acrobatics." --The New York Times Book Review

"Varied, clever, and delightful . . . these stories are consistent in their readability and quality." --Chicago Tribune

"Boyle sketches his characters with Swiftian good humor and crisp prose; in his best work he tempers his trademark irony with a trace of empathy." --The New Yorker

"He writes like a kid at a carnival, tossing off firecrackers of language that explode like Roman candles in our minds. . . . In marking out a literary universe that is both diverse and remarkably consistent, the stories here . . . add up to an oeuvre all their own." --The Village Voice

* A New York Times Notable Book


Card catalog description
T. C. Boyle Stories gathers together in one volume all the work from Boyle's four previous collections - as well as seven new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories map a wide geography of human emotions. There are no rules in a Boyle story, just as there is no subject too arcane or idea too bizarre to pursue to its skewed conclusion: a primate-center researcher becomes romantically involved with a suave and cultured chimp; Lassie abandons Timmy for a randy coyote; Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nina Khrushchev engage in a secret love affair that threatens the stability of the world; a death-defying stuntman rides across the country strapped to the axle of a big-rig truck. And more: a Hollywood flack does an image makeover of the Ayatollah; a couple searches for the last toads on earth (and a very special erotic charge); an entrepreneur creates a center for acquisitive disorders; an elderly woman valiantly defends her household of stray squirrels. Boyle is equally at home lampooning our most terrible fears, and examining the parameters of human love, frailty, and cultural dislocation at the tail end of a disordered century.


About the Author
T. C. Boyle is the author of seven novels and four short story collections. He received the PEN/Faulkner prize for his novel World's End. His short fiction regularly appears in major American magazines, including the New Yorker, Harper's, the Paris Review, Playboy, Esquire, and the Atlantic Monthly. He lives near Santa Barbara, California.