{ "item_title" : "The End Is Only a Beginning", "item_author" : [" T. Coraghessan Boyle "], "item_description" : "Twelve new stories that burn like a fever in the blood. The opening piece is a kind of modern fairy tale, in which a very stoned young woman invades a stranger's home and claims she belongs there. In another, a screenwriter succumbs to the deceptive power of his own fiction, while in the next, a single mother defends a Texas butterfly sanctuary against the right-wing zealots who seek to isolate it with the border wall. Add to these scenarios a 3D-printed gun, snow in July, a fateful wasp sting, and the dystopian year 2036, in which Greenland has long since become part of Trump's America, and more, much more, including a man-eating tiger and the menace of a suburban swimming pool. Boyle's imagination knows no bounds, leaping and snapping like a whip laying bare the tender epidermis of our society. Here we have stories that are both cosmopolitan and intimately human, reflecting Boyle's genius-like sleight of hand to compress miles of drama into just a few pages. As Ron Charles wrote, Boyle has long been one of the most exciting and intelligent storytellers in the United States.Praise for T. C. Boyle Over the course of his career, Boyle has been compared to everybody but Sappho, and there's probably no escaping name-dropping when discussing his fiction, since he's always trying on voices and forms, rummaging through the toy box and pulling out, for his own purposes, other people's shticks. He has S. J. Perelman's affection for the absurdities of pop culture as starting point . . . . He has Robert Coover's wicked sense of the flimsiness of our received cultural representations of goodness and virtue . . . . He has Donald Barthelme's gift for deadpan comic premises and for Osterizing high and low culture. --Jim Shepard, New York Times Book Review Boyle is the closest thing we have to a modern-day Washington Irving, that American storyteller par excellence who found a perfect balance between art and pop, and who lived and worked not far from Boyle's own boyhood home along the Hudson River. --Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times At his vaulting, imaginative best Boyle suggests the bastard child of Flannery O'Connor and Monty Python. -- Miami Herald Boyle's close alternate worlds are reminiscent at times of George Saunders's stories, but unlike the lefty Saunders, whose protagonists head-butt true ethical dilemmas and take on corporations and capitalism in the name of love and truth, Boyle frames individuals themselves as the problem. --Deb Olin Unferth, New York Times Book Review ?Boyle's wit and sharp ability to pack entire worlds into only a few pages is evident throughout. --Bustle", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/32/409/891/1324098910_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "28.99", "online_price" : "28.99", "our_price" : "28.99", "club_price" : "28.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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