T. C. Boyle

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 the New Yorker. Lonnie is tired. He's tired of his job, the monotony of it, and tired of the predictability of his home life now that he's a father. It's a day like every other day, and he can't face the inevitability of it all. So he lies. It's a small lie, but he knows small lies become big ones. He knows it as soon as he says his daughter is in the hospital. But he can't...

This short story from the collection Wild Child was originally published in Harper's. Mae is in her southern California garden early one morning when a tiger shows up at the edge of her yard. Meanwhile Mae's sister, Anita, is in Wisconsin grieving her dead husband, dealing with a pack of feral cats under her trailer, and trying to start a relationship with Todd, a man who's lobbying for a ballot measure that will allow people to kill strays. Mae...

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.

A novel set in a grim near-future Southern California follows the adventures of an ecoterrorist whose efforts to save the planet unwittingly place his own family at risk.

The story of illegal aliens in California, told through the eyes of two very different couples, one well-off Anglos, the other illegal Mexicans living in a canyon. The novel chronicles their relationship against the background of growing hostility between immigrants and natives.

In the title story of this rich new collection, T. C. Boyle has created so vivid and original a retelling of the story of Victor, the feral boy who was captured running naked through the forests of Napoleonic France, that it becomes not just new, but definitive: yes, this is how it must have been. The tale is by turns magical and moving, a powerful investigation of what it means to be human. There is perhaps no one better than T. C. Boyle at engaging,...

Robert Coover has been playing by his own rules for more than half a century, earning the 1987 Rea Award for the Short Story as "a writer who has managed, willfully and even perversely, to remain his own man while offering his generous vision and versions of America." Coover finds inspiration in everything from painting, cinema, theater, and dance to slapstick, magic acts, puzzles, and riddles. His 1969 story, "The Babysitter," has alone inspired...

"Remarkable how the nursery caught the telepathic emanations of the

children's minds...The children thought lions, and there were lions..."

-From The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

By turns funny, moving, romantic and surreal, and filled with unexpected twists and turns, each of the tales on this lineup has a magical element.

Andrew Lam's

The Palmist

performed by James Naughton

A chance encounter on a bus between a fortune-teller

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