T.C. Boyle will be reading from and discussing his recent short story, "The Lie" as well as talking about his new book, San Miguel.

 

Boyle’s jazzy, slangy, iridescent style could scarcely be more of the moment…He writes lyrically, beautifully—about the ocean, the land, about California history and its pitfalls and perils. Boyle makes us laugh and wonder at his dazzling gifts but his comedy is a dark business.” —Los Angeles Times’ review of When the Killing’s Done

 

Tom Coraghessan Boyle's vivid portraits of the Baby Boomer generation as well as the eccentric side of American life are seen in scores of short stories beginning with “The OD and Hepatitis Railroad or Bust,” which appeared in North American Review, and his first collection, The Descent of Man, published in 1979. His writing has appeared in eight subsequent collections and in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Atlantic Monthly, as well as in 14 novels such as World's End (1987), winner of the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction that told the story of several generations of families in the Hudson River Valley; The Women (2009), which imagines Frank Lloyd Wright's many romantic liaisons; and When the Killing's Done (2011) about collisions of nature and human caprice set in the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, California.

 

Boyle’s latest novel, San Miguel, returns to the setting introduced in When the Killing’s Done and focuses on the lives of real families who inhabited San Miguel, the first at the end of the 19^th century; the second during the Depression and the years leading up to World War II.

 

He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.