T. Coraghessan Boyle's Books
May.01.1995
A critic once said of T. Coraghessan Boyle, “More happens in one of Boyle’s stories than in most post-Victorian novels.” This is precisely the case in Without a Hero, fifteen stunning stories that each, in its own way, displays a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America. In this, his fourth story collection, Boyle takes chance after chance, even to the point of re-...
May.01.1994
Wellville is a rich plumcake of a book, full of ripely conceived characters, satire both broad and bitter, beautifully integrated period atmosphere and writing that is colorful but considered. Set in Battle Creek, Michigan., in the early years of the century, it evokes the days of C.W. Post and Will Kellogg, when fortunes were being made and lost in the national rage for the new...
Jan.01.1991
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, descendents 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...
Jul.27.1990
In seventeen slices of life that defy the expected and launch us into the absurd, 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, Quetzalcoatl Lite; and Lassie abandons Timmy for a randy coyote. Dark humor, delirious fantasy,...
Jul.20.1990
Haunted by the burden of his family’s traitorous past, woozy with pot, cheap wine, and sex, and disturbed by a frighteningly real encounter with some family ghosts, Walter Van Brunt is about to have a collision with history. It will lead Walter to search for his lost father. And it will send the story into the past of the Hudson River Valley, from the late 1960s back to the...
May.01.1990
In sixteen stories, T. Coraghessan 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...
May.01.1990
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 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...
May.06.1986
As he portrays environmentalists, surrogate mothers and drug dealers, “Boyle proves himself in this second story collection truly a master of that genre. Wide-ranging in subject and variously comic, tragic, poignant and horrific, the stories are all compounds of imagination, vitality and scrupulous craft,” wrote Publishers Weekly.
Jul.01.1983
T.Coraghessan Boyle’s first novel, Water Music is a funny, bawdy, extremely entertaining tale of imaginative and stylistic fancy that announced to the world Boyle’s tremendous gifts as a storyteller. Set in the late eighteenth century, Water Music follows the wild adventures of Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer, through London’s seamy gutters and...
About T. Coraghessan
T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of nineteen books of fiction, including, most recently, After the Plague (2001), Drop City (2003), The Inner Circle (2004), Tooth and Claw (2005), and Talk Talk (2006). Born Thomas John Boyle in Peekskill, New York, he grew...