Product Description

Customer Reviews (4)

Who knew sports writing could be so stirring or beautiful?
A delightful collection of poetry, short stories & essays celebrating the quintessential American sport. I never realized how lyrical and epic sports writing could be. With these often beautifully written works, the writers show themselves fully & consciously engaged in the wonder of life & existence.

Baseball stories
I spend a lot of time in my car and enjoy baseball so I thought this would keep me entertained and awake during my drive.It started off slow with an explanation of how it came about, but once they got into the stories, I was laughing and remembering some of the best games and stories in baseball.It is really helping me get through the winter and my baseball withdrawals.It has a wide variety of baseball memorabilia - stories and poems and tidbits from spectacular games.If you are a true baseball fan, this is a must have.

wonderful stories of baseball and americana!
What more can I say but excellent!I encourage any fan of baseball but more generally, those interested in American history and culture, to purchase this CD collection.It's insightful, humorous, and informative about America's pastime.

Selected Shorts: Baseball (Selected Shorts series)
This was absolutely wonderful!I have purchased several as gifts also and have heard rave reviews from all. ... Read more

Product Description
Hailed as one of the best short story writers of his generation, T.C. Boyle presents sixteen stories--nine of which appeared in The New Yorker--that highlight the evolving excellence of his inventive, modern, and wickedly witty style. In After the Plague, Boyle exhibits his maturing themes through an amazing array of subjects in a range of emotional keys. He taps today's headlines, from air rage ("Friendly Skies") to abortion doctors ("Killing Babies"), and delves into more naturalistic themes of quiet power and passion, from a tale of first love("The Love of My Life") to a story about confronting old age ("Rust"). Combining joy and humor with the dark, intense scenarios that Boyle's audience has come to love, After the Plague reveals a writer at the top of his form. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (23)

Screeching Halts
I really, really like T. Coraghessan Boyle's novels, so it follows that I should like his short stories, right?Well, no, as it turns out.The traits I like in his novels, including realistic irony, artful ambiguity, psychological depth, and narrative wholeness, are absent in this strange, confused mishmash.The stories read like novel ideas that Boyle lacked ambition to finish writing out to book length.

If you've read at least one or two Boyle novels, you'll recognize the pattern with which each story starts.Some individual thinks he (it's usually "he") controls his universe and moves with impunity.Then something happens that upsets that illusion of control.So far, so good.Sadly, that's as far as most of these stories get.Boyle gets a good head of steam, I get hooked on the premise, and then I guess he gets tired.

"Peep Hall" has a plain-spoken bartender fall for a pretty customer who, he later learns, makes her living on a porn-cam website.But just as they embrace their mutual attraction, screech, the story stops.I want to see this play out, and I think the characters do too, since one asks "What do we do now?"But Boyle either doesn't share that curiosity, or doesn't know where to go, because that's where he cuts them off.

Similarly, the title story posits a world devastated by a mutant ebola strain, the survivors hooking up and breaking up in a mock-erotic waltz of the damned.But again, Boyle doesn't have the courage to carry it beyond merely setting up an intriguing premise.Indeed, I can't quite tell if his tone is merely understated, or if he's read too little science fiction to have enough courage to complete this story.

This collection isn't without redeeming qualities.A few stories, like "Termination Dust," meet Boyle's high standards.This story, about an Alaska backwoodsman who romanticizes himself so thoroughly that he doesn't see other people's real emotions anymore, is both complete and sophisticated as printed.But unfortunately, it's so good that it only points out how disappointing the other stories are.

This collection points up a serious problem with publishing today.A novelist like Boyle gets his short stories printed in glossy magazines because his name moves copy, and editors overlook the fact that the stories kind of suck.Short stories are not novels that are short; the form has its own unique demands, which Boyle thoroughly ignores.And writers wonder why nobody reads short stories anymore.

Makes You Wonder
This is my first work of fiction by T.C. Boyle, but I am afraid that it may not inspire me to consider a second anytime soon.Boyle's conceits are clever, undeniably clever.He writes adroitly, and some of these stories (notably "She Wasn't Soft," "Killing Babies," and "Achates McNeil," all of which come early in this collection) end with twists so wrenching and provocative that they stick with you like literary classics.On the other hand, many of the other stories (including "Mexico," "Rust," "Peep Hall," "Going Down," "Friendly Skies," "The Underground Gardens," and the title story "After the Plague") read like graduate school creative writing class exercises -- of a high order, I grant you, but mechanical, fill-up-the-page, play-out-the-concept exercises nonetheless.Another way of putting it is that too many of Boyle's stories lack the high seriousness that some critics associate with art.

Part of the problem is Boyle's choice of protagonists.Most of his central characters are inept losers attempting to connect with persons for whom they are obviously ill-adapted.It takes a lot of skill, breadth, and humor for an author to keep up his reader's interest in alcoholics, hermits, obsessives, bookworms, senescents, beach bums, and unaculturated immigrants oblivious to the world around them.Sometimes Boyle succeeds.Often he does not.

In the stories here Boyle writes infrequently as a realist.Can you suspend your disbelief long enough to accept that the population of the earth has been reduced by 99.999% in two or three days and that a new Adam may just meet a new Eve from Hell?That an Alaskan barkeep would confuse an easy seduction with rape?That a 21-year-old pseudo-coed in stiletto heels would fall for another bartender in his forties who sends her drinks and dessert on the house?That a young mother would not only abandon her newborn baby but turn inexorably on the young father who unwillingly assists her?I am not a fan of naturalism, ironic science fiction, and gothic realism, and these are not situations that engaged me.Maybe you will enjoy them more.

Involving, creative, exciting...
My husband and I both read this book of shorts. It was really well written, and neither of us have forgotten it.
I wish we still had it! But we traded it while in Cambodia at a hostel. *sigh*

Highly recommend T.C. Boyle. This collection especially.

The cruelty of life has no limit
I was not a real short story lover before this collection. I found short stories did not have the vastness, the depth I like in a story, particularly when dealing with horror. But Boyle is special and his short stories are so deep with bleakness, so black with direness that within two or three pages we are glued to the subject and reading the story along faster and faster than it takes to tell or turn the pages. Just this density is essential and fascinating. The characters are definitely elaborate enough in small successive touches that they are alive in front of our eyes. But what makes the short stories remarkable is the end, the punch-line page or detail. There, in about ten lines, he twists the story and makes it become so cruel, so mentally twisted, so brutally revelatory that we stand there breathless in front of this ending and review each story backward and wonder how we could have reached such a morbid or insane ending without the use of any supernatural means. Just the psychology of his characters within the framework of their society. Psychotic is the word, most of the time, and we are all like that because society is like that. We are living in a psychotic world. Even worse. We have to be psychotic to survive in this world. And that psychotic survival instinct leads some people to extreme situations that end up in the media under the title of crime or lunacy or mentally impairedness. A brilliant writer indeed.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

John Cheever of our Generation
T.C. Boyle comes though again.Here he is again at the intersection of the mundane and the bizarre with sixteen terrific tales from an overactive imagination.No writer drops you as quickly into arcane, improbable or wickedly off-beat situations.The agony of the middle-seat on a flaming airliner, an attack on a lonely aging widow, the landscaper's eccentric client, a gold miner's cabin at the end of the Yukon trail ... the reader is going to some interesting places.

Here's an excellent self-description from the author in the middle of "Achates McNeil" an account of a famed writer and his overbearing relationship with his miserable college son:"A skinny man in his late forties with kinky hair and a goatee who dressed like he was twenty-five and had a dead black morbid outlook on life and twisted everything into the kind of joke that made you squirm."

Not a disappointing story in the bunch.Enjoy squirming.
... Read more