A feral boy is captured and 'civilised' in the Languedoc region. A young woman is hired to look after a cloned dog that cost its owners $250,000. A widower in a self-satisfied suburb engulfs his loneliness in a sea of rats. A weary city GP is baffled by a Mexican boy, the son of a taco-seller, who can feel no pain. A junior film editor invents the death of his own daughter because he can't face going in to work. A vindictive teenager with a gasoline fixation runs into trouble with his Japanese neighbour. Two washed-up crooners in 1950s New York get creative while recording a schmaltzy Christmas special. In this beguiling new collection of stories, T. C. Boyle, one of the world's greatest storytellers, explores the improbable, the tragic, the allegorical and the altogether ordinary.

Author Biography

T.C. Boyle's novels include World's End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, The Tortilla Curtain, Riven Rock, A Friend of the Earth, Drop City (which was a finalist for the National Book Awards), The Inner Circle and, most recently, the highly acclaimed The Women. His short story collections include After the Plague and Tooth and Claw, and his stories appear regularly in most major magazines, including the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Granta and the Paris Review. T.C. Boyle has been awarded the PEN/Malamud Award for lifetime achievement in the short story form and he was recently inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in California.