T. C. Boyle

Thomas Coraghessan Boyle (born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer.

He received a B.A. in English and History from the State University of New York at Potsdam (1968), an M.F.A. (1974) from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a Ph.D. (1977) from the University of Iowa.

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."

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.

Since the mid-1970s, he has published nineteen novels and more than 150 short stories.

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, Harper's, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly and Playboy, as well as on the radio show Selected Shorts.

Boyle has said Gabriel García Márquez is his favorite novelist.

He is also a fan of Flannery O'Connor and Robert Coover.

Boyle is married to Karen Kvashay.

They have three children and live in Montecito near Santa Barbara, California.

His novels include World's End (1987, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction); The Road to Wellville (1993); and The Tortilla Curtain (1995, winner of France's Prix Médicis étranger).

He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York.

He was previously a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Boyle grew up in Peekskill, New York.

His name was originally Thomas John Boyle; he changed his middle name to Coraghessan when he was 17 after an ancestor of his mother.

Boyle's novel The Road to Wellville was adapted into a film in 1994, also titled The Road to Wellville, by writer-director Alan Parker.

It starred Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Broderick, Bridget Fonda, John Cusack, Dana Carvey, and Colm Meaney.

The film was not well received either critically or financially, and was considered a box-office flop and appeared on several critics' worst-of-the-year lists.

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.

The following list is a selection of the many short stories Boyle has written: