The Tortilla Curtain

Author: Boyle, T.C.

Brand: Penguin Random House

Color: White

Binding: paperback

Format: Deckle Edge

Number Of Pages: 368

Release Date: 01-09-1996

Part Number: 21982886

Details: Product Description


T.C. Boyle’s tragicomic, award-winning novel about assimilation, immigration, and the price of the American dream   “A masterpiece of contemporary social satire.” —The Wall Street JournalTopanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican immigrants Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.


Review


Winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger
“A compelling story of myopic misunderstanding and mutual tragedy.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“Succeeds in stealing the front page news and bringing it home to the great American tradition of the social novel . . . A book to appreciate as we peer at the faces of strangers outside our windows, and wall ourselves in.”
—
The Boston Globe
“Lays on the line our national cult of hypocrisy. Comically and painfully he details the smug wastefulness of the haves and the vile misery of the have-nots.”
—Barbara Kingsolver,
The Nation
“Boyle’s writing is irresistible and his sense of dramatic timing is impeccable.”
—
Entertainment Weekly“America’s most imaginative contemporary novelist.”

—Newsweek
“It says a lot about T. Coraghessan Boyle’s new novel that so many generations of great satirists come to mind when reading it—from Swift to Twain to Waugh to Woody Allen, Boyle specifically evokes Voltaire.”
—
The Baltimore Sun
“Weaving social commentary into moving entertaining fiction is a job few writers can handle. Boyle does so here, admirably. Readers should not miss this latest work from an impressive talent.”
—
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Boyle’s sixth novel cements his place among the reigning pantheon of contemporary American fiction writers. (It’s one heck of a great read.)”
—
Rocky Mountain News
“A panoramic slice of social realism . . . [that] incorporates all of Boyle’s themes: the impossibility of assimilation, the need for control, the increasing helplessness of white males.”
—
Vogue
“A tale that squeezes one last cup of vinegar from
The Grapes of Wrath.”
—
Portland Oregonian


About the Author


T.C. Boyle is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the late 1970s, he has published sixteen novels and ten collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his novel World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger for The Tortilla Curtain in 1995; his 2003 novel Drop City was a finalist for the National Book Award. His honors include the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Henry David Thoreau Prize for excellence in nature writing, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.


PART ONE
Arroyo Blanco
1
AFTERWARD, HE TRIED TO REDUCE IT TO ABSTRACT terms, an accident in a world of accidents, the collision of opposing forces—the bumper of his car and the frail scrambling hunched-over form of a dark little man with a wild look in his eye—but he wasn’t very successful. This wasn’t a statistic in an actuarial table tucked away in a drawer somewhere, this wasn’t random and impersonal. It had happened to him, Delaney Mossbacher, of 32 Piñon Drive, Arroyo Blanco Estates, a liberal humanist with an unblemished driving record and a freshly waxed Japanese car with personalized plates, and it shook him to the core. Everywhere he turned he saw those red-flecked eyes, the rictus of the mouth, the rotten teeth and incongruous shock of gray in the heavy black brush of the mustache—

EAN: 9780140238280

Package Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches

Languages: English