Without a Hero

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • From the award–winning author of The Tortilla Curtain comes fifteen “gloriously comic . . . stories [that] are more than funny, better than wicked” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).

“Fifteen sterling tales marked . . . by a keen sense of the absurd and a . . . compassionate awareness of human frailty.”—The Washington Post
 
The stunning stories in Without a Hero each, in their own way, display a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America. T.C. Boyle takes chance after chance, even to the point of reexamining the ethos of Ernest Hemingway. In “Big Game,” the wild animal safari takes place not in Africa but on a pay-per-shoot ranch in Southern California and includes an elephant hunt and its vivid consequences.
 
Boyle displays an astonishing range as he zooms in on such American specimens as the college football player who knows only defeat; the entrepreneur who creates a center for acquisitive disorders; the couple in search of the last toads on earth; and the boy caught between the ingenuousness of childhood and the cynicism of adulthood in “The Fog Man.”
 
In some of these stories, Boyle makes you laugh out loud; in others, you come closer to understanding the human condition because of the way he cuts to the secret places in his peoples’ hearts.“The literary performances here retain Mr. Boyle’s astonishing and characteristic verve, his unaverted gaze, his fascination with everything lunatic and queasy. . . . His stories fill a reader with the giddy nausea of our cultural and theological confusions.”—The New York Times Book ReviewT. C. Boyle is a novelist and regular contributor to The New Yorker. His novels include World’s End and The Tortilla Curtain, and he has also published numerous collections of short stories. A Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California, he lives in Santa Barbara.