A Friend of the Earth opens in the year 2025, as Tyrone O’Shaughnessy Tidewater ekes out a bleak living in southern California, managing a rock star’s private menagerie. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed and most of the major mammalian species are extinct. Once Ty was so seriously committed to environmental causes that he became an ecoterrorist and convicted felon. Once he unwittingly endangered both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now when he’s just trying to survive, Andrea comes back into his life. What happens as the two slip into a reborn involvement makes for a gripping and topical story told in Boyle’s uniquely funny and serious voice.

“America’s most imaginative contemporary novelist blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the ultimate question of human love and the survival of the species.”—Newsweek

Few authors in America write with such sheer love of story, language, and imagination as T.C. Boyle, and nowhere is that passion more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and widely praised short stories. In After the Plague, Boyle speaks of contemporary social issues in a range of emotional keys. The sixteen stories gathered here address everything from air rage to abortion doctors to first love and its consequences. The collection ends with the brilliant title story, a whimsical and imaginative vision of a disease-ravaged Earth. Presented with characteristic wit and intelligence, these stories will delight readers in search of the latest news of the chaotic, disturbing, and achingly beautiful world in which we live.
 
“Boyle’s imagination and zeal for storytelling are in top form here.”—Publishers Weekly

Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful fiancé, Cat suddenly craves a snake: a glistening,
writhing creature that can be worn like “jewelry, living jewelry” to match her black jeans.
But when the budding social media star promptly loses the young “Burmie” she buys from
a local pet store, she inadvertently sets in motion a chain of increasingly dire and
outrageous events that comes to threaten her very survival.
“Brilliantly imaginative … in a terrifying way” (Annie Proulx), Blue Skies follows in the
tradition of T. C. Boyle’s finest novels, combining high-octane plotting with mordant wit
and shrewd social commentary. Here Boyle, one of the most inventive voices in
contemporary fiction, transports us to water-logged and heat-ravaged coastal America,
where Cat and her hapless, nature-loving family—including her eco-warrior parents, Ottilie
and Frank; her brother, Cooper, an entomologist; and her frat-boy-turned-husband, Todd—
are struggling to adapt to the “new normal,” in which once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters
happen once a week and drinking seems to be the only way to cope.
But there’s more than meets the eye to this compulsive family drama. Lurking beneath the
banal façade of twenty-first-century Californians and Floridians attempting to preserve
normalcy in the face of violent weather perturbations is a caricature of materialist
American society that doubles as a prophetic warning about our planet’s future. From pet
bees and cricket-dependent diets to species die-off and pummeling hurricanes, Blue Skies
deftly explores the often volatile relationships between humans and their habitats, in
which “the only truism seems to be that things always get worse.”
An eco-thriller with teeth, Boyle’s Blue Skies is at once a tragicomic satire and a prescient
novel that captures the absurdity and “inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything.”

The best-selling, PEN-Faulkner award-winning author of The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle is hailed as “America’s most imaginative contemporary novelist” (Newsweek). In 1970 a California commune pulls up stakes and moves to the harsh interior of Alaska. The members establish Drop City, a back-to-the-land town, on a foundation of peace and free love. But their idealism cannot prevent tension from rippling through the group. The results are anything but predictable in this honest, surprising evocation of a time period and its enduring beliefs.

An electric collection of new short stories from the inimitable, bestselling writer of Talk to Me and Outside Looking In

In the title story of Walk Between the Raindrops, a woman sits down next to a man at a bar and claims she has ESP. In “Thirteen Days,” passengers on a cruise line are quarantined, to horrifying and hilarious effect. And “Hyena” begins simply: “That was the day the hyena came for him, and never mind that there were no hyenas in the South of France, and especially not in Pont-Saint-Esprit–it was there and it came for him.”

A virtuoso of the short form, T.C. Boyle returns with an inventive, uproarious, and masterfully told collection of short stories characterized by biting satire, resonant wit, and a boundless, irrepressible imagination.

A provocative new novel from bestselling author T.C. Boyle exploring the first scientific and recreational forays into LSD and its mind-altering possibilities.

In this stirring and insightful novel, T.C. Boyle takes us back to the 1960s and to the early days of a drug whose effects have reverberated widely throughout our culture: LSD.

In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology Ph.D. student and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a free-wheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living. With his trademark humor and pathos, Boyle moves us through the Loneys’ initiation at one of Leary’s parties to his notorious summer seminars in Zihuatanejo until the Loneys’ eventual expulsion from Harvard and their introduction to a communal arrangement of thirty devotees–students, wives, and children–living together in a sixty-four room mansion and devoting themselves to all kinds of experimentation and questioning.

Is LSD a belief system? Does it allow you to see God? Can the Loneys’ marriage–or any marriage, for that matter–survive the chaotic and sometimes orgiastic use of psychedelic drugs? Wry, witty, and wise, Outside Looking In is an ideal subject for this American master, and highlights Boyle’s acrobatic prose, detailed plots, and big ideas. It’s an utterly engaging and occasionally trippy look at the nature of reality, identity, and consciousness, as well as our seemingly infinite capacities for creativity, re-invention, and self-discovery.

From bestselling and award-winning author T.C. Boyle, a lively, thought-provoking novel that asks us what it would be like if we could really talk to the animals

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 know it.

What if it were possible to speak to the members of another species–to converse with them, not just give commands or coach them but to really have an exchange of ideas and a meeting of minds? Did apes have God? Did they have souls? Did they know about death and redemption? About prayer? The economy, rockets, space? Did they miss the jungle? Did they even know what the jungle was? Did they dream? Make wishes? Hope for the future?

These are some the questions T.C. Boyle asks in his wide-ranging and hilarious new novel Talk to Me, exploring what it means to be human, to communicate with another, and to truly know another person–or animal…

Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author T.C. Boyle makes his Ecco debut with a powerful, gripping novel that explores the roots of violence and anti-authoritarianism inherent in the American character.

Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people–an aging ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son’s paranoid, much older lover–as they careen towards an explosive confrontation.

On a vacation cruise to Central America with his wife, seventy-year-old Sten Stensen unflinchingly kills a gun-wielding robber menacing a busload of senior tourists. The reluctant hero is relieved to return home to Fort Bragg, California, after the ordeal–only to find that his delusional son, Adam, has spiraled out of control.

Adam has become involved with Sara Hovarty Jennings, a hardened member of the Sovereign Citizens’ Movement, right-wing anarchists who refuse to acknowledge the laws and regulations of the state, considering them to be false and non-applicable. Adam’s senior by some fifteen years, Sara becomes his protector and inamorata. As Adam’s mental state fractures, he becomes increasingly schizophrenic–a breakdown that leads him to shoot two people in separate instances. On the run, he takes to the woods, spurring the biggest manhunt in California history.

As he explores a father’s legacy of violence and his powerlessness in relating to his equally violent son, T. C. Boyle offers unparalleled psychological insights into the American psyche. Inspired by a true story, The Harder They Come is a devastating and indelible novel from a modern master.

Right on the heels of his New York Times bestselling and National Award-nominated novel, Drop City, T.C. Boyle has crafted an even more captivating tale with memorable characters and a rollicking plot that will delight both his longtime devotees and a legion of new fans. 

The Inner Circle is a love story narrated by John Milk, a virginal young man who in 1940 accepts a job as an assistant to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a charming professor of zoology at Indiana University who has just discovered his life’s true calling: sex. As a member of Kinsey’s “inner circle” of researchers, Milk (and his beautiful new wife) is called on to participate in sexual experiments that become increasingly uninhibited—and problematic for his marriage. For in his later years, Kinsey (a sexual enthusiast of the first order) pushed the boundaries both personally and professionally.

While T.C. Boyle is known as one of our greatest American novelists, he is also an acknowledged master of the short story and is perhaps at his funniest, his most moving, and his most surprising in the short form. In The Relive Box, Boyle’s sharp wit and rich imagination combine with a penetrating social consciousness to produce raucous, poignant, and expansive short stories defined by an inimitable voice.

From the collection’s title story, featuring a Halcom X1520 Relive Box that allows users to experience anew almost any moment from their past to “The Five-Pound Burrito,” the tale of a man aiming to build the biggest burrito in town, the twelve stories in this collection speak to the humor, the pathos, and the struggle that is part of being human while relishing the whimsy of wordplay and the power of a story well told. In stories that span a variety of styles and genres, Boyle addresses the enduring concerns of the human mind and heart while taking on timely social concerns. The Relive Box is an exuberant, linguistically dazzling effort from a “vibrant sensibility fully engaged with American society.” (The New York Times)

A deep-dive into human behavior in an epic story of science, society, sex, and survival, from one of the greatest American novelists today, T. C. Boyle, the acclaimed, bestselling, author of the PEN/ Faulkner Award-winning World’s End and The Harder They Come.

It is 1994, and in the desert near Tillman, Arizona, forty miles from Tucson, a grand experiment involving the future of humanity is underway. As climate change threatens the earth, eight scientists, four men and four women dubbed the “Terranauts,” have been selected to live under glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-earth colony. Their sealed, three-acre compound comprises five biomes–rainforest, savanna, desert, ocean, and marsh–and enough wildlife, water, and vegetation to sustain them.

Closely monitored by an all-seeing Mission Control, this New Eden is the brainchild of ecovisionary Jeremiah Reed, aka G.C.–“God the Creator”–for whom the project is both an adventure in scientific discovery and a momentous publicity stunt. In addition to their roles as medics, farmers, biologists, and survivalists, his young, strapping Terranauts must impress watchful visitors and a skeptical media curious to see if E2’s environment will somehow be compromised, forcing the Ecosphere’s seal to be broken–and ending the mission in failure. As the Terranauts face increased scrutiny and a host of disasters, both natural and of their own making, their mantra: “Nothing in, nothing out,” becomes a dangerously ferocious rallying cry.

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 players in this survivalist game, probing their motivations and illuminating their integrity and fragility to illustrate the inherent fallibility of human nature itself.

PEN-Faulkner Award-winning author T. Coraghessan Boyle weaves together the stories of two families in Southern California – one affluent, the other destitute. As Boyle creates a counterpoint of personal needs, civic responsibility, and social custom, each family’s quest for the American Dream fuels a deep fear and anger that ultimately lead to a perilous confrontation.

The fourteen stories gathered here, which have appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and Playboy, as well as in The O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Stories volumes, display T. C. Boyle’s imaginative muscle, emotional sensitivity and astonishing range. There are the whimsical tales for which Boyle is justly famous, including “Swept Away,” which tells of a female ornithologist who falls in love on the blustery island of Unst, and “The Kind Assassin,” about a bored and loveless radio shock jock who sets the world record for most continuous hours without sleep–and who may never sleep again.

Listeners will love the comedic drama and lyrical beauty of the title story, about a young man who must contend with a vicious feral cat from Africa that he has won in a bar bet. And who could resist the gripping power of “Dogology,” about a young woman in suburban New England who becomes so obsessed with man’s best friend that she begins to lose her own identity to a pack of strays, or “Chicxulub,” a nerve-shattering tale of collision, whether it be that of a young woman with a car or of huge objects from outer space slamming into the planet. With these compelling and always entertaining stories, Boyle proves once again that he is “a writer who can take any topic and spin a yarn too good to put down” (Men’s Journal).

T.C. Boyle was first feted as a master of the short story for his critically acclaimed Greasy Lake. With these stories applauded by People magazine as “wickedly comical,” he displays once again a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America today. Without a Hero zooms in on American phenomena such as a center for the treatment of acquisitive disorders; a couple in search of the last toads on earth; and a real estate wonder boy on a dude safari near convenient Bakerfield, California. Sharp, guileful, and malevolently funny, Boyle’s stories are “more than funny, better than wicked,” says The Philadelphia Inquirer. “They make you cringe with their clarity.”