T. C. Boyle

Twelve new stories that burn like a fever in the blood. The opening piece is a kind of modern fairy tale, in which a very stoned young woman invades a stranger’s home and claims she belongs there. In another, a screenwriter succumbs to the deceptive power of his own fiction, while in the next, a single mother defends a Texas butterfly sanctuary against the right-wing zealots who seek to isolate it with the border wall. Add to these scenarios a 3D-printed gun, snow in July, a fateful wasp sting and the dystopian year 2036, in which Greenland has long since become part of Trump’s America, and more, much more, including a man-eating tiger and the menace of a suburban swimming pool. Boyle’s imagination knows no bounds, leaping and snapping like a whip laying bare the tender epidermis of our society. »His stories are sometimes funny, often disturbing, always surprising, and at times breathtaking. Great storytelling.« (Deutschlandfunk Kultur)