T. C. Boyle has 11 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 19 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.9★ across 13 ratings. The most-rated is The Tortilla Curtain.
The Tortilla Curtain
Summary
Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacker lead an ordered, sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: He is a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican illegals Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. From the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delany into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding. Winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger and now a major motion picture.
©1995 T. Coraghessan Boyle (P)2006 Blackstone Audio Inc.
The Relive Box and Other Stories
Summary
While T. C. Boyle is known as one of our greatest American novelists, he is also an acknowledged master of the short story and is perhaps at his funniest, his most moving, and his most surprising in the short form. In The Relive Box, Boyle's sharp wit and rich imagination combine with a penetrating social consciousness to produce raucous, poignant, and expansive short stories defined by an inimitable voice. From the collection's title story, featuring a Halcom X1520 Relive Box that allows users to experience anew almost any moment from their past, to "The Five-Pound Burrito", the tale of a man aiming to build the biggest burrito in town, the 12 stories in this collection speak to the humor, the pathos, and the struggle that is part of being human while relishing the whimsy of wordplay and the power of a story well told. In stories that span a variety of styles and genres, Boyle addresses the enduring concerns of the human mind and heart while taking on timely social concerns. The Relive Box is an exuberant, linguistically dazzling effort from a "vibrant sensibility fully engaged with American society" (New York Times).
©2017 T. Coraghessan Boyle (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers
Selected Shorts: A Touch of Magic
Summary
By turns funny, moving, romantic and surreal, and filled with unexpected twists and turns, each of the tales on this lineup has a magical element. Andrew Lam's "The Palmist", performed by James Naughton. A chance encounter on a bus between a fortune-teller and a teenage boy. Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt", performed by Stephen Colbert. A room which can take you anywhere in the world - sometimes with dangerous consequences W. W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw", performed by John Lithgow. A wonderful ghost story about a trinket with terrible powers. Saki's "The Occasional Garden", performed by Daniel Gerroll. If you can't grow a garden; poof! - you can rent one. Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon", performed by Maria Tucci. There's something suddenly in the sky in midtown Manhattan.... Kevin Brockmeier's "The Year of Silence", performed by Anthony Rapp. What if everything went quiet? Jonathan Safran Foer's "The Sixth Borough", performed by Jerry Zaks. Yes, New York had a Sixth Borough, but it drifted away.... Aimee Bender's "Drunken Mimi", performed by Bernadette Quigley. A romance between a mermaid and an imp. Haruki Murakami's "The Little Green Monster", performed by Dana Ivey. A piece of Murakami magic: Is this a monster I see before me? T. C. Boyle's "Swept Away", performed by René Auberjonois. This story's weather forecast: Very windy and very funny.
©2009 Symphony Space (P)2009 Symphony Space
When the Killing's Done
Summary
From the best-selling author of The Women comes an action-packed adventure about endangered animals and those who would protect them. Principally set on the wild and sparsely inhabited Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, T. C. Boyle’s powerful new novel combines pulse-pounding adventure with a socially conscious, richly humane tale regarding the dominion we attempt to exert, for better or worse, over the natural world. Alma Boyd Takesue is a National Park Service biologist who is spearheading the efforts to save the islands’ endangered native creatures from invasive species like rats and feral pigs, which, in her view, must be eliminated. Her antagonist, Dave LaJoy, is a dreadlocked local businessman who, along with his lover, the folksinger Anise Reed, is fiercely opposed to the killing of any species whatsoever and will go to any lengths to subvert the plans of Alma and her colleagues. Their confrontation plays out in a series of escalating scenes in which these characters violently confront one another, contemplate acts of sabotage, court danger, and tempt the awesome destructive power of nature itself. Boyle deepens his story by going back in time to relate the harrowing tale of Alma’s grandmother, Beverly, who was the sole survivor of a 1946 shipwreck in the channel, as well as the tragic story of Anise’s mother, Rita, who in the late 1970s lived and worked on a sheep ranch on Santa Cruz Island. In dramatizing this collision between protectors of the environment and animal rights activists, Boyle is, in his characteristic fashion, examining one of the essential questions of our time: Who has the right of possession of the land, the waters, the very lives of all the creatures who share this planet with us?
©2011 T. Coraghessan Boyle (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Women
Summary
Frank Lloyd Wright's life was one long, howling struggle against the bonds of convention, whether aesthetic, social, moral, or romantic. He never did what was expected, and he never let anything get in the way of his larger-than-life appetites and visions. Told through the experiences of the four women who loved him, this imaginative account of Wright's raucous life blazes with Boyle's trademark wit and invention. Boyle's protean voice captures these very different women and, in doing so, creates a masterful ode to the creative life in all its complexity and grandeur.
©2009 T. Coraghessan Boyle (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
San Miguel
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Women, a historical novel about three women’s lives on a California island. On a tiny, desolate, windswept island off the coast of Southern California, two families, one in the 1880s and one in the 1930s, come to start new lives and pursue dreams of self-reliance and freedom. Their extraordinary stories, full of struggle and hope, are the subject of T. C. Boyle’s haunting new novel. Thirty-eight-year-old Marantha Waters arrives on San Miguel on New Year’s Day 1888 to restore her failing health. Joined by her husband, a stubborn, driven Civil War veteran who will take over the operation of the sheep ranch on the island, Marantha strives to persevere in the face of the hardships, some anticipated and some not, of living in such brutal isolation. Two years later their adopted teenage daughter, Edith, an aspiring actress, will exploit every opportunity to escape the captivity her father has imposed on her. Time closes in on them all and as the new century approaches, the ranch stands untenanted. And then in March 1930, Elise Lester, a librarian from New York City, settles on San Miguel with her husband, Herbie, a World War I veteran full of manic energy. As the years go on they find a measure of fulfillment and serenity; Elise gives birth to two daughters, and the family even achieves a celebrity of sorts. But will the peace and beauty of the island see them through the impending war as it had seen them through the Depression? Rendered in Boyle’s accomplished, assured voice, with great period detail and utterly memorable characters, this is a moving and dramatic work from one of America’s most talented and inventive storytellers.
©2012 T.C. Boyle (P)2012 Penguin
Sprich mit mir
Summary
T.C. Boyles neuer Roman über Wissenschaftler, Schimpansen und den Menschen im Tier. Sam, der zweijährige Schimpanse, den Professor Schemerhorn in eine TV-Show bringt, kann in der Gebärdensprache nicht nur einen Cheeseburger bestellen, sondern auch seinen Namen sagen. Wie ein Kind wächst der Affe umsorgt von Wissenschaftlern in Schemerhorns Pflegefamilie auf. Als die schüchterne Aimee dazu stößt, entspinnt sich eine einzigartige Beziehung: Sam erwidert nicht nur ihre Gefühle, er entwickelt sich regelrecht zu einem Individuum. Als jedoch die Vision Schemerhorns, der an das Menschliche im Tier glaubt, keine Schule macht, wird er für Tierexperimente von einer anderen Universität beschlagnahmt. Aimee ist am Boden zerstört und fasst einen verrückten Plan, um ihren engsten Freund zu retten.
©2021 Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, München. Übersetzung von Dirk van Gunsteren (P)2021 der Hörverlag
The Terranauts
Summary
A deep dive into human behavior in an epic story of science, society, sex, and survival, from one of the greatest American novelists today, T. C. Boyle, the acclaimed best-selling author of the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning World's End and The Harder They Come. It is 1994, and in the desert near Tillman, Arizona, 40 miles from Tucson, a grand experiment involving the future of humanity is underway. As climate change threatens the Earth, eight scientists, four men and four women dubbed the Terranauts, have been selected to live under glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-Earth colony. Their sealed three-acre compound comprises five biomes - rain forest, savanna, desert, ocean, and marsh - and enough wildlife, water, and vegetation to sustain them. Closely monitored by an all-seeing Mission Control, this New Eden is the brainchild of ecovisionary Jeremiah Reed, aka G. C. - God the Creator - for whom the project is both an adventure in scientific discovery and a momentous publicity stunt. In addition to their roles as medics, farmers, biologists, and survivalists, his young, strapping Terranauts must impress watchful visitors and a skeptical media curious to see if E2's environment will somehow be compromised, forcing the ecosphere's seal to be broken - and ending the mission in failure. As the Terranauts face increased scrutiny and a host of disasters both natural and of their own making, their mantra, "nothing in, nothing out", becomes a dangerously ferocious rallying cry. Told through three distinct narrators - Dawn Chapman, the mission's pretty young ecologist; Linda Ryu, her bitter, scheming best friend passed over for E2; and Ramsay Roothorp, E2's sexually irrepressible wild man - The Terranauts brings to life an electrifying, pressured world in which connected lives are uncontrollably pushed to the breaking point. With characteristic humor and acerbic wit, T. C. Boyle indelibly inhabits the perspectives of the various players in this survivalist game, probing their motivations and illuminating their integrity and fragility to illustrate the inherent fallibility of human nature itself.
©2016 T. Coraghessan Boyle (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers
A Death in Kitchawank, and Other Stories
Summary
Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T. C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. Here are 14 new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The stories here reflect his maturing themes. They find Boyle engagingly testing his characters' emotional and physical endurance, whether it's a group of giants being bred as weapons of war in a fictional Latin American country, a Russian woman who ignores dire warnings in returning to her radiation-contaminated home, a hermetic writer who gets more than a break in his routine when he travels to receive a minor award, or a man in a California mountain town who goes a little too far in his concern for a widow.
©2013 T. C. Boyle (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
A Friend of the Earth
Summary
A Friend of the Earth opens in the year 2025, as Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tidewater ekes out a bleak living in southern California, managing a rock star's private menagerie. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed and most of the major mammalian species are extinct. Once Ty was so seriously committed to environmental causes that he became an ecoterrorist and convicted felon. Once he unwittingly endangered both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now when he's just trying to survive, Andrea comes back into his life. What happens as the two slip into a reborn involvement makes for a gripping and topical story told in Boyle's uniquely funny and serious voice.
©2000 T.C. Boyle (P)2000 Books on Tape, Inc.
Selected Shorts
Summary
The cast of characters in this compilation is a menagerie of animals: cats, dogs, birds, even a dragon - and their owners. These stories look at the myriad of experiences, and adventures, that pet ownership can bring. Join a medieval scholar who discovers that not all mythical creatures are extinct, stalk the night with the Cat of Frankenstein, kick that caffeine habit with a class of kindergartners, dance along with a divorcée and her dog, and more!
©2007 Symphony Space, Inc. (P)2007 Symphony Space, Inc.