Sunday, April 24, 2011

T. C. Boyle

T. C. Boyle's many novels include World's End (winner of the PEN/FaulknerAward), Drop City (a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award), and the newly released When the Killing's Done.

From his Q & A with Anna Metcalfe at the Financial Times:

What book changed your life?

The book that got me going as a writer was Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants. It fractures stories and tries to find out what storytelling is.

* * *
What’s the strangest thing you’ve done when researching a book?

For The Inner Circle there were 418 pages of pure sex. So I took my wife to Bloomington [home of Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction] and we had sex.

* * *
Which literary character most resembles you?

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, a Rudyard Kipling story about a mongoose who saves a family in India from evil cobras.
Read the complete Q & A.

See--T.C. Boyle's 4 favorite books to turn to for comfort.

--Marshal Zeringue