T.C. Boyle Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Chapbooks

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Anthologies

T. Coraghessan Boyle or T.C. Boyle as he is better known by his fans, is a famous American author and short story writer. He was born on December 02, 1948 as Thomas John Boyle in Peekskill, New York, United States. Boyle started his writing career in the mid-1970s and since then, he has written around 14 novels and over 100 short stories. The third novel written by Boyle, World’s End won him the PEN/Faulkner award in the year 1988. The novel became widely popular because it gave an account of 300 years in the upstate New York. The success of this novel helped Boyle to establish himself as a noteworthy author. As a child, he grew up in a small town near the Hudson Valley. Boyle has often used the place as a fictional plot by the name of Peterskill in many of his novels and short stories. When he was seventeen years old, he changed his middle name to Coraghessan from John and since then, he has kept it in all his records permanently. However, he is often called as T.C. Boyle by his friends and colleagues.

Before becoming a full time author, Boyle used to work at the University of Southern California as a Distinguished Professor of English since the year 1978. It was in the same year when he founded the creative writing undergraduate program at his school. In his writing career, Boyle has always liked to write his novels based on the literature and fiction genres. After finishing his school studies, Boyle enrolled himself at the State University of New York situated in Potsdam and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in the subjects of History and English in the year 1968. Further, he went on to achieve his M.F.A from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in the year 1974. After that, Boyle obtained his Ph.D from the same university in the year 1977. Boyle worked very hard after his post graduation in order to set up his writing career. And after he achieved that feat, he made sure to give his fans what they wanted from him and hence, many of the novels written him frequently explore and feature the baby boom generation, its addictions, joys and appetites. The themes of his male heroes and anti-heroes often appear alongside humor, brutal satire and a magical realism. The slick appeal of his anti-heroes and the misguided efforts of his heroes are the perfect examples to explain this.

The fiction novels written by Boyle often feature the unpredictability and the ruthlessness of nature and its hazardous effects on the human society and the environment. The other novels written by him such as The Tortilla Curtain helped him to win the Prix Medicis Etranger award of France in the year 1995. The short stories written by him have appeared for numerous times in the major magazines of America, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy and the Harper’s, as well as they also been a part of the radio shows. As of today, Boyle is happily married and is the father of 3 children. He lives along with his family near Santa Barbara in California. Boyle has said in his interviews that the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of his favorite authors. He is also a very big fan of the authors Robert Coover and Flannery O’Connor.

The novels written by Boyle have been published between the years 1995 and 2012. One of the initial novels written by him was ‘The Inner Circle’. It was published by the Viking Adult publishing house in the year 2003. The novel came out as a fresh publication after the Boyle had become a New York Times bestselling author. His previous novel Drop City had won him the nomination for the National Book Award and hence, this novel was a very special one to him. Before this novel, Boyle had spun many interesting novels describing the dazzling stories. This novel too was written with the intention of delighting his longtime fans and a legion of his devotees. The novel contains all the elements that make a book successful among its readers. It was full of interesting characters, sexual descriptions of adult sex, a rollicking plot, etc. Written in the form of a love story, The Inner Circle’s story is narrated by a virginal young man named John Milk. John takes up a job as an assistant of Dr. Alfred Kinsey in the year 1940. Dr. Kinsey is described by the author as an extraordinary professor of zoology at the University of Indiana. Milk is asked to participate along with his newly wed and beautiful wife in the research experiments carried out by Dr. Kinsey, which are related to sex. The experiments eventually become uninhibited and create problems in the married life of John Milk. A sexual enthusiast himself, Dr. Kinsey deliberately pushed the boundaries both professionally and personally. The novel is a very moving subject and gives a likeable look at marriage, sex and jealousy that kept the readers thinking about their own relationships. Boyle did not resist even for once while trying to give the sexual descriptions of the characters of the novel and this helped the novel to become widely popular.

One of the other novels written by T.C. Boyle was called ‘Talk Talk’, which was published by the Viking Adult publishing house in the year 2006. The novel deals with the desperate pursuit of a woman for a man with whom she has fallen in love and who is said to have stolen her true identity. In the opening plot of the novel, the first interaction of the main characters is given by the author. When Bridger saw Dana dancing in bare feet for the first time, she looked extremely gracious. Her hair was glowing red in the club light and her body was throbbing on the beats of the rhythms. Bridger was mesmerized to see her. On the their first date, Bridger came to know that she was permanently deaf, but he had already fallen in love with her and was not able to think of what to do. After some days, Dana is seen in a courtroom, arrested on account of a number of charges including auto theft, assault with a deadly weapon, passing fake checks as well as a few others. It was evident that the officials had made a mistake by arresting an innocent person. It is then revealed that a man named William Wilson has been committing the crimes at the expense of Dana. Bridger comes to help Dana to find William Wilson in order to make him pay for his crimes. Together, the two begin to give each other one more chance to build a new life with each other. The novel is appreciated by many readers as an exciting road trip across the various regions of America. The story, love, and language of the novel helped t to become very successful among the masses of America.