Mythic and realist, farcical and tragic, these fifteen “fables of contemporary life [are] so funny and acutely observed that they might have been written [for] Saturday Night Live” (The New York Times)—from the award–winning author of The Tortilla Curtain.
“Boyle . . . owns a ferocious, delicious imagination, often darkly satirical and always infatuated with language.”—The Los Angeles Times Book Review
In “The Hector Quesadilla Story,” T.C. Boyle writes of an aging Latin ballplayer, long past his best stuff, who on his birthday is put into an endless rotation in a game that goes on forever; in “All Shook Up,” he tells of the doomed affair between his narrator and the sweet, feckless wife of an aspiring Elvis Presley look-alike; in “On for the Long Haul,” he describes the grim scenarios enacted by a credulous survivalist and his family in their nuclear-holocaust-proof haven in the sticks; and in the title story, he portrays a terrifying and violent encounter between a bunch of late-adolescent layabouts and a murderous drug-dealing biker.
- ISBN10 0140077812
- ISBN13 9780140077810
- Publish Date 6 May 1986 (first published 30 January 1986)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 29 January 2010
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Penguin Putnam Inc
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 240
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780140077810