Without a Hero
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"Fifteen sterling tales marked . . . by a keen sense of the absurd and a . . . compassionate awareness of human frailty."--The Washington Post
The stunning stories in Without a Hero each, in their own way, display a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America. T.C. Boyle takes chance after chance, even to the point of reexamining the ethos of Ernest Hemingway. In "Big Game," the wild animal safari takes place not in Africa but on a pay-per-shoot ranch in Southern California and includes an elephant hunt and its vivid consequences.
Boyle displays an astonishing range as he zooms in on such American specimens as the college football player who knows only defeat; the entrepreneur who creates a center for acquisitive disorders; the couple in search of the last toads on earth; and the boy caught between the ingenuousness of childhood and the cynicism of adulthood in "The Fog Man."
In some of these stories, Boyle makes you laugh out loud; in others, you come closer to understanding the human condition because of the way he cuts to the secret places in his peoples' hearts.
T C Boyle
T.C. Boyle is an American novelist and short-story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published eighteen novels and twelve collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988 for his third novel, World's End, and the Prix Médicis étranger (France) in 1995 for The Tortilla Curtain. His novel Drop City was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award. Most recently, he has been the recipient of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Henry David Thoreau Prize, and the Jonathan Swift Prize for satire. He is a Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara.
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