Thomas Coraghessan Boyle (born December 2, 1946) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published nineteen novels and more than 150 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988,[3] for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York.
In Understanding T. C. Boyle, Paul William Gleason writes, "Boyle's stories and novels take the best elements of Carver's minimalism, Barth's postmodern extravaganzas, García Márquez's magical realism, O'Connor's dark comedy and moral seriousness, and Dickens' entertaining and strange plots and brings them to bear on American life in an accessible, subversive, and inventive way."[7]
Many of Boyle's novels and short stories explore the baby boom generation, its appetites, joys, and addictions. His themes, such as the often-misguided efforts of the male hero and the slick appeal of the anti-hero, appear alongside brutal satire, humor, and magical realism. His fiction also explores the ruthlessness and the unpredictability of nature and the toll human society unwittingly takes on the environment.[8] His novels include World's End (1987, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction); The Road to Wellville (1993);[9] and The Tortilla Curtain (1995, winner of France's Prix Médicis étranger).[10][citation needed]
Boyle has published eleven collections of short stories, including Descent of Man (1979), Greasy Lake (1985), If the River Was Whiskey (1989), and Without a Hero (1994). His short stories frequently appear in the major American magazines, including The New Yorker,[11]Harper's,[12]Esquire,[13]The Atlantic Monthly[14] and Playboy,[15] as well as on the radio show Selected Shorts.[16]
Boyle is married to Karen Kvashay. They have three children and live in Montecito near Santa Barbara, California.[2] Their home was imperiled in the 2017 Thomas Fire which consumed 440 square miles and over 1,000 structures in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, killing a firefighter in the latter. The fires denuded drought-stricken hillsides of vegetation and torrential rains in January 2018 subsequently dislodged immense boulders and precipitated mudslides which destroyed over one hundred homes and killed almost two dozen of his neighbors. Over 10,000 people were evacuated from Montecito as a result of the sequence of natural disasters. Boyle extensively documented both calamities on his website, and additionally in an article for The New Yorker.[19]
T.C. Boyle Stories II (2013), compiles three volumes of short fiction (After the Plague, Tooth and Claw, Wild Child) with a new collection of 14 stories entitled "A Death in Kitchawank"
The Relive Box & Other Stories (2017)
I Walk Between the Raindrops (2022)
List of stories
The following list is a selection of the many short stories Boyle has written:
^Pickle, Betsy (December 30, 1994). "Searching for the Top 10... Whenever They May Be". Knoxville News-Sentinel. p. 3.
^Lovell, Glenn (December 25, 1994). "The Past Picture Show the Good, the Bad and the Ugly -- a Year Worth's of Movie Memories". San Jose Mercury News (Morning Final ed.). p. 3.