T.C. Boyle

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T.C. Boyle

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born
December 02, 1948 in Peekskill, NY, The United States

gender
male

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About this author

T. Coraghessan Boyle (also known as T.C. Boyle, born Thomas John Boyle on December 2, 1948) is a U.S. novelist and short story writer. Since the late 1970s, he has published eleven novels and more than 60 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is married with three children. Boyle has been a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California since 1978, when he founded the school's undergraduate creative writing program.

He grew up in the small town on the Hudson Valley that he regularly fictionalizes as Peterskill (as in widely anthologized short story Greasy Lake). Boyle changed his middle name when he was 17 and exclus...more


Average rating: 3.65 · 36,993 ratings · 5,412 reviews · 56 distinct works
The Tortilla Curtain
3.63 of 5 stars 3.63 avg rating — 9,549 ratings — published 1995 — 43 editions
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Drop City
3.75 of 5 stars 3.75 avg rating — 4,717 ratings — published 2003 — 18 editions
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The Women: A Novel
3.37 of 5 stars 3.37 avg rating — 3,608 ratings — published 2008 — 25 editions
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The Road to Wellville
3.56 of 5 stars 3.56 avg rating — 2,406 ratings — published 2004 — 15 editions
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The Inner Circle
3.5 of 5 stars 3.50 avg rating — 2,114 ratings — published 2003 — 21 editions
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Talk Talk
3.33 of 5 stars 3.33 avg rating — 2,064 ratings — published 2006 — 19 editions
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World's End
3.94 of 5 stars 3.94 avg rating — 1,213 ratings — published 1987 — 13 editions
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Water Music
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4.14 of 5 stars 4.14 avg rating — 1,193 ratings — published 1981 — 16 editions
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A Friend of the Earth
3.6 of 5 stars 3.60 avg rating — 1,183 ratings — published 1990 — 12 editions
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Riven Rock
3.58 of 5 stars 3.58 avg rating — 1,123 ratings — published 1997 — 13 editions
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Interviews

January 2011, T.C. Boyle
"His Favorite Books About Animals Eating People: Biologists weed out unwanted species in his new book When the Killing's Done, so Boyle turns the tables and shares his favorite stories about man-hungry carnivores." ...More

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“But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it.”
T.C. Boyle

“Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self?”
T.C. Boyle

“I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.”
T.C. Boyle

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