A second volume of collected short fiction-from the bestselling author and winner of the 2015
Rea Award for the Short Story Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as
T.C. Boyle and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive wickedly funny and always
entertaining short stories. In 1998 T.C. Boyle Stories brought together the author's first
four collections to critical acclaim. Now T.C. Boyle Stories II gathers the work from his
three most recent collections along with fourteen new tales previously unpublished in book form
as well as a preface in which Boyle looks back on his career as a writer of stories and the art
of making them. By turns mythic and realistic farcical and tragic ironic and moving Boyle's
stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The fifty-eight stories in this new volume
written over the last eighteen years reflect his maturing themes. Along with the satires and
tall tales that established his reputation readers will find stories speaking to contemporary
social issues from air rage to abortion doctors and character-driven tales of quiet power and
passion. Others capture timeless themes from first love and its consequences to confrontations
with mortality or explore the conflict between civilization and wildness. The new stories find
Boyle engagingly testing his characters' emotional and physical endurance whether it's a group
of giants being bred as weapons of war in a fictional Latin American country a Russian woman
who ignores dire warnings in returning to her radiation-contaminated home a hermetic writer
who gets more than a break in his routine when he travels to receive a minor award or a man in
a California mountain town who goes a little too far in his concern for a widow. Mordant wit
emotional power exquisite prose: it is all here in abundance. T.C. Boyle Stories II is a grand
career statement from a writer whose imagination knows no bounds.
