T.C. Boyle has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.9★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is The Harder They Come.
The Harder They Come
Summary
Acclaimed New York Times best-selling author T.C. Boyle makes his Ecco debut with a powerful, gripping novel that explores the roots of violence and antiauthoritarianism inherent in the American character. Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people - an aging ex-marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son's paranoid, much older lover - as they careen toward an explosive confrontation. On a vacation cruise to Central America with his wife, 70-year-old Sten Stensen unflinchingly kills a gun-wielding robber menacing a busload of senior tourists. The reluctant hero is relieved to return home to Fort Bragg, California, after the ordeal - only to find that his delusional son, Adam, has spiraled out of control. Adam has become involved with Sara Hovarty Jennings, a hardened member of the Sovereign Citizens' Movement, right-wing anarchists who refuse to acknowledge the laws and regulations of the state, considering them to be false and nonapplicable. Adam's senior by some 15 years, Sara becomes his protector and inamorata. As Adam's mental state fractures, he becomes increasingly schizophrenic - a breakdown that leads him to shoot two people in separate instances. On the run, he takes to the woods, spurring the biggest manhunt in California history. As he explores a father's legacy of violence and his powerlessness in relating to his equally violent son, T. C. Boyle offers unparalleled psychological insights into the American psyche. Inspired by a true story, The Harder They Come is a devastating and indelible novel from a modern master.
©2015 T. C. Boyle (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
Going for a Beer
Summary
Robert Coover has been playing by his own rules for more than half a century, earning the 1987 Rea Award for the Short Story as "a writer who has managed, willfully and even perversely, to remain his own man while offering his generous vision and versions of America." Coover finds inspiration in everything from painting, cinema, theater, and dance to slapstick, magic acts, puzzles, and riddles. His 1969 story, "The Babysitter," has alone inspired generations of innovative young writers. Here, in this selection of 30 of his best stories, you will find an invisible man tragically obsessed by an invisible woman; a cartoon man in a cartoon car who runs over a real man who is arrested by a real policeman with cartoon eyes; a stick man who reinvents the universe.
©2018 Robert Coover; Introduction copyright 2018 by T. C. Boyle (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
After the Plague
Summary
Few authors in America write with such sheer love of story, language, and imagination as T.C. Boyle, and nowhere is that passion more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and widely praised short stories. In After the Plague, Boyle speaks of contemporary social issues in a range of emotional keys. The 16 stories gathered here address everything from air rage to abortion doctors to first love and its consequences. The collection ends with the brilliant title story, a whimsical and imaginative vision of a disease-ravaged Earth. Presented with characteristic wit and intelligence, these stories will delight readers in search of the latest news of the chaotic, disturbing, and achingly beautiful world in which we live.
©2001 T. Coraghessan Boyle (P)2001 Books on Tape, Inc.
Talk Talk
Summary
There’s more than one way to take a life…The first time he saw Dana she was dancing barefoot, her hair aflame in the red glow of the club, her body throbbing with rhythms and cross-rhythms that only she could hear. He was mesmerized. That night they were both deaf, mouthing to each other over the booming bass. And it was not until their first date, after he had agonized over what CD to play in the car, that Bridger learned that her deafness was profound and permanent. By then he was falling in love. Now she is in a courtroom, her legs shackled, as a list of charges is read out. She is accused of assault with a deadly weapon, auto theft, and passing bad checks, among other things. Clearly there has been a terrible mistake. A man, his name is William "Peck" Wilson, as Dana and Bridger eventually learn - has been living a blameless life of criminal excess at her expense. And as Dana and Bridger set out to find him, they begin to test to its very limits the life they have begun to build together. Talk Talk is both a suspenseful chase across America and a moving story about language, love, and identity from one of America’s most versatile and entertaining novelists.
©2006 T.C. Boyle
Outside Looking In
Summary
A provocative new novel from best-selling author T.C. Boyle exploring the first scientific and recreational forays into LSD and its mind-altering possibilities. In this stirring and insightful novel, T.C. Boyle takes us back to the 1960s and to the early days of a drug whose effects have reverberated widely throughout our culture: LSD. In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology PhD student, and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a freewheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living. With his trademark humor and pathos, Boyle moves us through the Loneys’ initiation at one of Leary’s parties to his notorious summer seminars in Zihuatanejo until the Loneys’ eventual expulsion from Harvard and their introduction to a communal arrangement of 30 devotees - students, wives, and children - living together in a 64-room mansion and devoting themselves to all kinds of experimentation and questioning. Is LSD a belief system? Does it allow you to see God? Can the Loneys’ marriage - or any marriage, for that matter - survive the chaotic and sometimes orgiastic use of psychedelic drugs? Wry, witty, and wise, Outside Looking In is an ideal subject for this American master and highlights Boyle’s acrobatic prose, detailed plots, and big ideas. It’s an utterly engaging and occasionally trippy look at the nature of reality, identity, and consciousness, as well as our seemingly infinite capacities for creativity, reinvention, and self-discovery.
©2019 T.C. Boyle (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers
The Inner Circle
Summary
Right on the heels of his New York Times best-selling and National Book Award-nominated novel, Drop City, T.C. Boyle has crafted an even more captivating tale with memorable characters and a rollicking plot that will delight both his longtime devotees and a legion of new fans. The Inner Circle is a love story narrated by John Milk, a virginal young man, who in 1940 accepts a job as an assistant to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a charming professor of zoology at Indiana University who has just discovered his life's true calling: sex. As a member of Kinsey's "inner circle" of researchers, Milk (and his beautiful new wife) is called on to participate in sexual experiments that become increasingly uninhibited, and problematic for his marriage. For in his later years, Kinsey (a sexual enthusiast of the first order) pushed the boundaries both personally and professionally.
©2004 T. Coraghessan Boyle (P)2004 Books on Tape