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T. Coraghessan Boyle

Goodreads Author

Born

in Peekskill, NY, The United States

Website

http://www.tcboyle.com/

Twitter

tcboyle

Genre

Literature & Fiction

Member Since

October 2008

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T. Coraghessan Boyle (also known as T.C. Boyle, is a U.S. novelist and short story writer. Since the late 1970s, he has published eighteen novels and twleve collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is married with three children. Boyle has been a
Professor of English at the University of Southern California since 1978, when he founded the school's undergraduate creative writing program.

He grew up in the small town on the Hudson Valley that he regularly fictionalizes as Peterskill (as in widely anthologized short story Greasy Lake). Boyle changed his middle name when he was 17 and exclusively used Coraghessan for much of his career, ...more

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T. Coraghessan Boyle’s books

Average rating: 3.71 · 166,678 ratings · 18,462 reviews · 208 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Tortilla Curtain 3.66 avg rating — 35,356 ratings — published 1995 — 103 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Drop City 3.84 avg rating — 15,730 ratings — published 2003 — 54 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Women 3.56 avg rating — 11,740 ratings — published 2009 — 64 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Harder They Come 3.63 avg rating — 7,446 ratings — published 2015 — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Blue Skies 3.76 avg rating — 6,805 ratings — published 2023 — 21 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Road to Wellville 3.70 avg rating — 6,916 ratings — published 1993 — 67 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Water Music by T. Coraghessan Boyle (Goodreads Author), James R. Kincaid (Goodreads Author) (contributor) 4.19 avg rating — 5,717 ratings — published 1981 — 46 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Terranauts 3.34 avg rating — 7,079 ratings — published 2016 — 31 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	When the Killing's Done 3.65 avg rating — 5,999 ratings — published 2011 — 47 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Inner Circle 3.60 avg rating — 5,440 ratings — published 2003 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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147 posts
T. Coraghessan Boyle's Blog

Frightened Enough?

Scariest Halloween ever, with three days till the election. And who is the bogeyman hanging over the freedom to vote, the very foundation of our democracy? It’s not Putin, though he certainly has his hand in, it’s not Xi or Khamenei, no, it’s far more frightening and absurd than that. What kind of America are we living in where our president is the biggest threat to our elections and our continued Read more of this blog post »

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Published on November 01, 2026 10:42

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"In Bed" with T.C. Boyle

His Favorite Books About Animals Eating People: Biologists weed out unwanted species in his new book When the Killing's Done, so Boyle turns the...

T.’s Recent Updates

T. Coraghessan Boyle wrote a new blog post Frightened Enough? Scariest Halloween ever, with three days till the election. And who is the bogeyman hanging over the freedom to vote, the very foundation of our democ Read more of this blog post »
Nov 01, 2026 10:42AM · 7 likes · like
T. Boyle made a comment on No Worries " This is the blackest period our country has ever endured. If we overcome it, we will rejoice. "
Sep 02, 2026 11:45AM · see blog post
T. Boyle made a comment on No Joke " I hear you, Chris and Paul. I feel as if I'm hanging on by my fingertips over a great yawning chasm and Trump keeps tying pianos to my back (as well a ...more "
Apr 05, 2025 10:42AM · see blog post
T. Boyle answered Audrey's question: I'm teaching a short fiction workshop soon and will ask participants to read a "A Death in Kitchawank" and "Chicxulub." Different writers find story ideas in different ways--some inspired by a single image or phrase, others by recurring themes or persistent what-if questions. I'm curious: where do your story ideas originate, either generally or in the case of these two pieces? Thx in advance from a longtime fan! For me, a story can originate from any source. With "Chicxulub" I'd long been contemplating our place in the universe and how tentative it is; the story of the accident with the daughter came from something I'd read in the newspaper, which makes the See Full Answer
Jan 05, 2025 10:48AM · 3 likes · like

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Quotes by T. Coraghessan Boyle (?)

“I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.”
― T.C. Boyle

tags: life, writing

61 likes

“But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it."

[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]”
― T.C. Boyle

tags: art, creation, fiction, stories, writers, writing

52 likes

“Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self?”
― T.C. Boyle

tags: writing

42 likes

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Polls

Which author do you like for our April short stories read?

Alice Munro

8 votes, 34.8%

William Trevor

5 votes, 21.7%

Kelly Link

4 votes, 17.4%

T.C. Boyle

3 votes, 13.0%

Heinrich Heine

3 votes, 13.0%

23 total votes

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