The New York Times remarked on the book’s “overall inventiveness, flash and just plain entertainment value.” The Village Voice said Boyle “writes like a kid at a carnival, tossing off firecrackers of language that explode like Roman candles in our minds.”īoyle inverts the old maxim about writing what you know: “I say, write what you don’t know.” The famous Boyle texture and detail doesn’t come from personal experience, but from painstaking research. In these 68 tales, Boyle bounces easily from psychological naturalism to giddy slapstick, dreamy surrealism to biting satire - sometimes within the space of a single story.Ĭritics have, as usual, been uninhibited in their praise of Boyle’s writing. But the goateed court jester of American fiction is still very much at home in the humble short-story genre, as his recently released collection, T.C. His last three novels - Riven Rock, The Tortilla Curtain and The Road to Wellville - all enjoyed wide success.

Strike while the iron is hot, the saying goes and Boyle’s iron is sizzling. My editor felt that with the warm response to my last three novels, there might be a new audience that didn’t know what I’ve accomplished with the short story.” “Most writers come out with their collected stories about two weeks before they die,” the USC English professor points out.

Coraghessan Boyle is not dead, though he has published a collection of his short stories - a portentous sign, he would have you believe.

The court jester book