T. Coraghessan Boyle

"From best-selling novelist T. C. Boyle, a satirical yet ultimately moving take on contemporary American life in the glare of climate change"-- Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful fiancé, Cat suddenly craves a snake: a glistening, writhing creature that can be worn like "jewelry, living jewelry" to match her black jeans. But when the budding social media star promptly loses the young "Burmie" she buys from a local pet store, she inadvertently...

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 Ph.D. 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 free-wheeling exploration...

When animal behaviorist Guy Schermerhorn demonstrates on a TV game show that he has taught Sam, his juvenile chimp, to speak in sign language, Aimee Villard, an undergraduate at Guy's university, is so taken with the performance that she applies to become his assistant. A romantic and intellectual attachment soon morphs into an interspecies love triangle that pushes hard at the boundaries of consciousness and the question of what we know and how we...

Young Japanese seaman Hiro Tanaka, inspired by dreams of the City of Brotherly Love and trained in the ways of the samurai, jumps ship off the coast of Georgia and swims into a net of rabid rednecks, genteel ladies, descendants of slaves, and the denizens of an artists' colony. In the hands of T. Coraghessan Boyle, praised by Digby Diehl in Playboy as "one of the most exciting young fiction writers in America," the result is a sexy, hilarious tragicomedy...

Traces an incrementally violent confrontation between a National Park Service biologist who would eradicate invasive wildlife on the Channel Islands and two locals who are fiercely opposed to the killing of any creatures.

It is 1994, and in the desert near Tillman, Arizona, forty 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 -- rainforest, savanna, desert, ocean and marsh -- and enough...

Alma Boyd Takesue, a National Park Service biologist, is in charge of preserving the Channel Islands' native animals, which means removing the rats and feral pigs from the island chain. However, businessman Dave LaJoy and folksinger Anise Reed staunchly oppose Alma's plans to kill the rats and pigs, and actively work against her.

From silly chuckles to rueful ironic glee to deep cosmic laughter, this new volume of humorous tales samples the best of recent seasons of the popular public radio series Selected Shorts.

T. Coraghessan Boyle's's

The Lie

performed by Stephen Colbert

Jonathan Lethem'ss

The Spray

performed by Robert Sean Leonard

Miranda July's

The Swim Team

performed by Parker Posey

Saki'

The

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Recounts the life of Frank Lloyd Wright as told through the experiences of the four women who loved him: the Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff; the passionate Southern belle Maud Miriam Noel; the spirited Mamah Cheney, tragically killed; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin.