After The Plague
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0747557039
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
'"After the Plague" is a formidable achievement. It is hip, slick and witty'. - "Sunday Telegraph". ' A mercurial craftsman mustering some of his most assured work'. - "FT". 'Boyle has the ability to create devastating situations, lighten them with a satirical gleam and then twist them into the kind of joke that makes your stomach hurt'. - "Daily Mail". 'Boyle writes so beautifully it always feels natural, never forced'. - "Guardian". Maverick, unpredictable and accomplished, T.C. Boyle has been called the 'trickster of American letters'. "After the Plague" is his latest collection of short stories - here are tales that superbly veer from the psychological to the slapstick, from surrealism to satire, once again proving him to be one of America's most formidable writers.
cost him and the fifteen-cent admission, and he never went back. No, he stayed home with his shovel and his vision, and many days he didn’t know morning from night. Saturdays, though, he kept sacred. Saturday was the day he walked the three and a half miles to Siagris’ Drugstore, through winter rains and summer heat that reached a hundred and sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. He prided himself on his constancy, and he was pleased to think that Ariadne looked forward to his weekly visits as much as he
of the vulcanizing process. So yeah, let’s go for it.” “There’s a place up the beach,” she said, “in town. I hear it’s pretty good—Los Crotos? Want to try it?” “Sure,” he said, but the deadness crept back into his legs. Up the beach? In town? It was dark out there, and he didn’t speak the language. She was watching him. “If you don’t want to, it’s no big deal,” she said, finishing off her drink and setting the glass down with a rattle of ice that sounded like nothing so much as loose teeth
picture her—her now, China, the love of his life—and he couldn’t. What did she look like? What was her face like, her nose, her hair, her eyes and breasts and the slit between her legs? He drew a blank. There was no way to summon her the way she used to be or even the way she was in court, because all he could remember was the thing that had come out of her, four limbs and the equipment of a female, shoulders rigid and eyes shut tight, as if she were a mummy in a tomb … and the breath, the
taking a hard-earned break, stretched out in comfort on the last besieged patch of grass and trying to muster the energy to haul all that yellowing turf out to my pickup. We’d really humped it all afternoon, so caught up in the rhythm of destruction we never even stopped for a drink from the hose, but we couldn’t help but look guilty now—you always do when the client catches you on your rear end. I introduced her to Greg, who didn’t bother to get up. “I’m very pleased to meet you,” she said, and
thing into his chest with so much force he found himself sprawling backwards in the sand even as the kids took to their feet and the harsh, high laughter rang in his ears. Then it was the bar, the scene at the bar at four o’clock in the afternoon, when the sun was still high and nobody was there. Edison didn’t even bother to go home and change. He hadn’t gone near the water—he was too furious, too pissed off, burned up, rubbed raw—and aside from a confectioner’s sprinkle of dry sand on his ankle