Recovering from jet lag after an inter national book tour, author T.C. Boyle kicked off another tour for his latest book, “T.C. Boyle Stories II,” with a rare stop in Malibu on Saturday at the Bank of Books book store at Point Dume for a quick signing.
“Malibu is a destina tion you don’t usually go to on a book tour,” Boyle said. “I was on my way down to the West Hollywood Book Fair from Santa Barbara. It seemed very logical.” said. “I was on my way down to
Boyle, whose first name is short for T. Coraghessan, teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California, where he is a ten ured professor. His third novel, “World’s End,” won the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award. A child of the 1960s, much of his fic tion centers around the exploits of the Baby Boomer generation.
On Saturday Bank of Books offered advanced copies of Boyle’s latest short story col lection, T.C. Boyle Stories II, out Oct. 3. It comprises all 58 short stories Boyle has written in the last 15 years, separated into four parts. The first three sections—“After The Plague,” “Tooth and Claw” and “Wild Child Other Stories”—contain the stories previously published, while the fourth, “A Death in Kitchawank,” is full of 14 new stories Boyle has written since the publication of “Wild Child” in 2010.
“I suppose [the stories are] the same variety that [readers] would get in earlier stories,” Boyle said of the new collec tion. “The stories are set in various locales, they are about various things and they’re all told in various modes. You won’t find me repeating myself or being stuck in one mode. I like to try everything. They should be fun.”
The book functions as a sort of retrospective of Boyle’s career, similar to its prede cessor, “T.C. Boyle Stories,” showcasing the variety of Boyle’s aesthetic. In the new stories, he said he deals with styles and subject matters he rarely uses, such as in the story that titles the section, “A Death in Kitchawank.”
“I think that is probably the best there,” he said. “It’s very rare for me. It contains auto biographical elements. I still don’t do a lot of it, but this one in particular is. I’d been want ing to write about the death of this man who was very close to me and couldn’t quite get a handle on that.”
Boyle said he chose a unique style to tell such a per sonal story.
“It has a different style in it. It’s from an old woman’s point of view, except the author steps into the story and talks about his being there,” he said. “It’s interesting, I hope, for me and the readers. It makes it very personal in a way that another story, like ‘Burning Wood,’ it’s just a guy talking, does not.”
Boyle said the way the sec tion is organized is also a little different from the older sec tions. The first six stories, which were written prior to his last novel, “San Miguel,” pub lished in 2012, read in chrono logical order. The order of the final eight, written after “San Miguel,” is a little more diffi cult for Boyle to explain.
“One comes after the other and I don’t exactly know why, so I could write a comic piece like ‘My Pain is Worse Than Your Pain’ or a story about Chernobyl, like ‘In The Zone,’” Boyle said. “You want one story to reflect another, like in the distant, dis tant time when bands wanted to sell music. They would make albums and they would have songs play in a certain order to balance each other.”
Boyle’s tour comes on the heels of a tour through Germany, to promote a German translation of “San Miguel,” and Austria, where 100,000 copies of “Tortilla Curtain” were given away as part of a national program to make read ing more accessible. The “T.C. Boyle Stories II” tour is sched uled to take him around the West Coast and New York.
“I’m a slave to my publish er,” Boyle said of touring. “I do exactly what they tell me.”
But when touring begins, writing doesn’t end.
“Now I have to face that inspiration, or lack thereof, because I just finished a novel just before the German tour,” he said. “It’s a good period for me to be on the road. I’m already starting to think of the next phase of story writing.”
