Known for his blend of black humor and slightly off-kilter characters, T. Coraghessan Boyle has garnered a reputation for inserting verbal pyrotechnics and a bizarre mix of subjects in his novels and story collections. Boyle finds humor and pathos in subjects ranging from African exploration to corn flake barons and even environmental degradation, and his stories are filled with quirky characters, lush descriptions, and cynical humor. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s he went from relatively unknown short-story writer to bestselling novelist, his wildly imaginative stories eliciting comparisons to the works of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Evelyn Waugh. Los Angeles Times Book Review writer Charles Champlin termed Boyle's prose "a presence, a litany, a symphony of words, a chorale of idioms ancient and modern, a treasury of strange and wondrous place names, a glossary of things, good food and horrendous ills," while Times Literary Supplement...