“Who else of Boyle’s generation could have assembled, by this point, a collected stories the size of the Phoenix phone book? Boyle has S.J. Perleman’s affection for the absurdities of pop culture as starting point, Richard Coover’s wicked sense of the flimsiness of our received cultural representations of goodness and evil, Donald Barthelme’s gift for deadpan comic premises…. The fact that I’ve just negotiated [its] seven hundred pages and I’m not sick to death of it attests to its overall inventiveness, flash, and just plain entertainment value.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A great fat book, by a youngish writer making his claim to Maestro status … reveal[s] a writer born to elegance and equipped with keen eyes, ears, and a preternatural skill at evoking the objects of his roving interest.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Varied, clever, and delightful … Boyle has a reputation for wit, which is evident, along with his versatility, in these tales … these stories are consistent in their readability and quality.”
—The Chicago Tribune
“T.C. Boyle Stories gives ample evidence of Boyle’s encyclopedic range … there are few authors who could master half as many settings … this often delicious collection confirms the success of Boyle’s prodigious effort to resuscitate the comic tale.”
—New York Newsday
“Each [story hops] with manic energy … at his vaulting, imaginative best Boyle suggests the bastard child of Flannery O’Connor and Monty Python.”
—The Miami Herald
“Boyle has utterly seduced me with his short stories … there’s enough variety here to fill a five and dime, and enough pathos, irony, sardonicism, cleverness, humor (both good and ill), passion and despair to fuel a schizophrenic … furthermore, Boyle clearly wants to have fun with these pieces…. Boyle’s more of a John Cheever: sharp, precise, masterful … no other writer I can think of has such a good time with this format.”
—Men’s Journal
“Boyle is an essential writer of our times … there is much to be admired: lively prose, a wicked sense of humor, an erudite intelligence, informed cultural perception.”
—The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
“The fantastically creative but contradicted Boyle is at play here, toying with littleness and bigness the same way he does in his offbeat, funny and ‘deadly serious’ (his phrase) novels and short works…. Boyle can be as contrary, satirical, and emotionally crushing in a few pages as he is in four hundred.”
—The Kansas City Star
“A kind of bulging grab bag into which you can reach for a variety of treats—high spirited, bitter, savage, melancholy or howlingly funny … he is an exuberant writer, a precise and sometimes lyrical stylist … his curiosity appears almost boundless … a timely reminder of the range and talent of one of America’s best writers.”
—The Rocky Mountain News
“A generous feast of fiction that is never less than interesting.”
—The Boston Herald
“Boyle’s wide-ranging stories defy the usual categories.”
—The Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Reading T.C. Boyle Stories—a whopping, almost seven hundred page gathering of sixty-eight pieces—feels like spending the liveliest, longest week of one’s life with scores of familiar people you know are cripples by various forms of what Boyle terms ‘aggregation disorder’ … most of Boyle’s stories also stand as prescient vivisections of larger phenomena that result from motives confused by promises of easy gains and quiet corruptions…. Hyperactively personable, dolorous, wickedly funny and written in an accessible style that conflates Cheever, O’Connor, Hiaasen and some ghosts of Richard Brautigan, the collection will transport you through American cities and suburbs.”
—The Seattle Times
“In this nearly seven hundred-page collection, whose sixty-nine stories include a few never before published, Boyle comes across as a level-headed literary extremist. As a writer he’s attracted to extremes, geographical and existential. But as a conspicuously sane ironist, he’s also devastatingly skeptical of those extremes.”
—New York Daily News