T. C Boyle

When animal behaviorist Guy Schermerhorn demonstrates on a TV game show that he has taught Sam, his juvenile chimp, to speak in sign language, Aimee Villard, an undergraduate at Guy's university, is so taken with the performance that she applies to become his assistant. A romantic and intellectual attachment soon morphs into an interspecies love triangle that pushes hard at the boundaries of consciousness and the question of what we know and how we...

Having brought to life eccentric cereal king John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle, T. C. Boyle now turns his fictional sights on an even more colorful and outlandish character: Frank Lloyd Wright.

Boyle's account of Wright's life, as told through the experiences of the four women who loved him, blazes with his trademark wit and invention. Wright's life was one long howling struggle

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T. C. Boyle is one of the most renowned storytellers of the modern era. This collection of fourteen stories drifts effortlessly between myth and reality, encompassing a panorama of human emotions. In "The Marlbane Manchester Musser Award," Boyle reveals a writer's dismay when a simple trip is turned upside down by a stranger. "Los Gigantes" tells the story of a group of giants being used to create a new breed of soldier for the military. In "The Way...

This short story from the collection Wild Child was originally published in Best Life. Smithstown is a divided community, and Cal is right in the middle. He believes, like his best friend Dave, that evolution is scientific fact. But he's drawn to Lynnese, a devout Christian who believes in intelligent design and whose daughter, Mary-Louise, has only widened the chasm forming in the town. As Smithstown is split between science and religion and their...

This short story from the collection Wild Child was originally published in the New Yorker. Thirteen-year-old Dill has a tendency to get in trouble, to act out, and perhaps it is due to his mother's latest boyfriend, Grady, leaving them behind. Meanwhile Sanjuro Ichyguro and his wife have moved from Japan to the United States and are having trouble adjusting. Between the cultural divide, the swelling emotions of their respective losses, and budding...

This short story from the collection Wild Child was originally published in Playboy. Marita Vallalba is revered in her Venezuelan village, and not just because her son, Aquiles Maldonado, is a big league baseball player in the United States. In fact, it is because of her son and his multimillion-dollar contract that has been splashed across the Venezuelan newspapers that she is kidnapped and held for ransom. Upon returning home, Aquiles is advised...

This short story from the collection Wild Child was originally published in Playboy. It's the middle of a snow storm, and Johnny Bandon, a washed up crooner in the style of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, is getting ready to record a Christmas single. The session musicians are there, and so is his backup singer. Darlene Delmar is a down and out soul singer ravaged by cheating boyfriends and STDs. But for this one moment in time, maybe music can reach...

This short story from the collection Wild Child was originally published in the New Yorker. Dámaso Funes is a medical miracle. He didn't make a sound when he was born, and as the years go by it's found that he doesn't feel pain. Not when he picks up hot coals with his bare hands or when he breaks his leg. To his father he is a sideshow freak, a spectacle from which he can make money, but to the village doctor who delivered him he is much more. He...

This short story from Wild Child was originally published in A Public Space. Reeling from his second divorce, Hunter is taken out on a party boat by his old college roommate, Damian. Looking forward to the promise of distraction, and maybe even the chance to meet a woman, Hunter acquiesces to the fishing adventure, despite his tendency toward seasickness. But outings with Damian are just as uncertain as the sea.

"...Told through three distinct narrators?Dawn Chapman, the mission?s pretty, young ecologist; Linda Ryu, her bitter, scheming best friend passed over for E2; and Ramsay Roothorp, E2?s sexually irrepressible Wildman?The Terranauts brings to life an electrifying, pressured world in which connected lives are uncontrollably pushed to the breaking point. With characteristic humor and acerbic wit, T.C. Boyle indelibly inhabits the perspectives of the various...