Without a Hero: Stories
T. Coraghessan Boyle
Language: English
Pages: 238
ISBN: 0140178392
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
T.C. Boyle was first feted as a master of the short story for his critically acclaimed Greasy Lake. With these stories applauded by People magazine as "wickedly comical," he displays once again a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America today. Without a Hero zooms in on American phenomena such as a center for the treatment of acquisitive disorders; a couple in search of the last toads on earth; and a real estate wonder boy on a dude safari near convenient Bakerfield, California.
Sharp, guileful, and malevolently funny, Boyle's stories are "more than funny, better than wicked," says The Philadelphia Inquirer. "They make you cringe with their clarity."
right, then left, ducking this obstruction, vaulting the next, shoving through the tangle as easily as we might have parted the bead curtains in a Chinese restaurant. And as we drew closer, that sound, that trill, that raucous joyous paean to life swelled round us till it seemed to vibrate in our every cell and fiber. “There!” Adrian cried suddenly. “Over there!” I saw it in that moment, a shallow little scoop of a pond caught in the web of the branches. The water gave nothing back, dead black
hunger faded and he felt better and better as the evening wore on. He was telling the young man about pemmican, how it was the highest-energy food man had yet to devise and how many calories you had to replace daily just to stay alive at seventy-five below, when all at once he felt as lucid as he ever had. He caught himself up so suddenly he almost choked. This wasn’t the young man from the Geographic Society, not at all. There was the same fringe of patchy, youthful beard, the startled blue eyes
A trick of the mind, that was all, one little mistake—getting off at the wrong stop, turning right instead of left—and the world became a strange and unfathomable place, terrain to explore all over again. He didn’t mind. They’d come for him, Leverett and his wife, sweet girl, really, and the grandchildren, they’d find him. But then a little wedge of concern inserted itself along the fracture lines of his psyche, and it became a worry. Who was this man if he wasn’t from the Geographic Society, and
and exclusion. They turned on me because I had taken Maki Duryea to the dance—or rather, because I had allowed her to take me—and because she was different and their parents disapproved in a way they couldn’t yet define. I resented her for it, and I resented my mother too. And so, when the rumors first began to surface, I took a kind of guilty satisfaction in them. There had been trouble at Maid’s house. Vandals—and the very term gave me a perverse thrill—vandals had spray-painted racial slurs
See anything funny out there? Over.” She forced herself to look up then and locate the stranger’s eyes—he was still grinning, but the grin was slack and unsteady and there was no joy in the deeps of those hard blue eyes—and she held the black plastic mike to her lips a moment longer than she had to before answering. “Nothing, Zack,” she said, “just checking in.” His voice was tinny. “Okay,” he said. “Talk to you. Over and out.” “Over and out,” she said. And now what? The guy wore a hunting