The powerHouse Arena is pleased to invite you to
a reading, signing, and discussion of:

Wild Child and The Women
by T. C. Boyle

Friday, January 29, 7–9PM
powerHouse Arena · 37 Main Street (corner of Water & Main St.) · DUMBO, Brooklyn
RSVP: wildchild@powerHouseArena.com

The author reads, signs, and discusses his brand-new collection of short stories, and the new paperback of The Women—Boyle's best-selling account of the life of Frank Lloyd Wright as told by the women who loved him.

About Wild Child:
For Wild Child, Boyle chose as an epigraph Thoreau's line: "In wilderness is the preservation of the world," and indeed most of these stories address natural concerns, or, in what has become a specialty of Boyle's stories, nature run amok. The title story that closes the collection is Boyle's own version of the classic Truffaut film, L'Enfant Sauvage, about Victor, the feral boy who was captured running naked through the forests of Napoleonic France and turned over to doctors who attempt to civilize him. There are many other treats as well, including "La Conchita," about a man who is attempting to deliver a human liver for transplant, only to get caught in a gigantic mudslide that wipes out the highway as well as a small coastal California town (and which was based on a real life 2005 mudslide in the town of the same name). "Thirteen Hundred Rats," is about a lonely old man whose house is overflowing with rodents; "Question 62," about what happens when a mountain lion starts to terrorize suburban California yuppies in their gardens, and "Admiral," about a young woman who is charged with babysitting a cloned Afghan that cost his owners $250,000. Each of these stories makes the reader just a little bit uncomfortable as Boyle asks us to remember that, civilized or not, we are all human animals.

Watch The Women book Trailer

About The Women:
"Boyle at his best...Love, not architecture, is the focus here." —The New York Times Book Review
"Riveting..."—The Wall Street Journal
"Wonderfully entertaining...In his inexhaustable capacity to beguile us as a natural storyteller, T.C. Boyle is surely one of our most American novelists since Mark Twain, one of our very best."
—The Boston Globe

After exploring the lives of cereal king Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville and sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey in The Inner Circle, T. C. Boyle turned his attention to an equally colorful, egocentric, and audacious figure: Frank Lloyd Wright. His twelfth novel, The Women, is a dazzling account of Wright's life as told through the tempestuous experiences of the four women who loved him: Catherine "Kitty" Tobin, his first wife with whom he had six children; his mistress, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of one of Wright's clients, whom he first met in 1905 and who was infamously murdered, along with seven others, by a deranged servant at Wright's Wisconsin estate, Taliesin, in 1914; Maud Miriam Noel, a passionate Southern belle with a fondness for morphine; and his third wife with whom he lived out the remainder of his years, the Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff, an exotic, imperious dancer who was a student of the Russian mystic Gurdjieff. Each of the four women's stories plays out in a surprising, comedic, and ultimately poignant manner, and, as one might expect, Boyle comes up with a highly creative way to tell the tale–backwards in time, beginning with Olgivanna, as each new love interest first meets Wright and encounters her predecessor. A second story, moving forwards in time, is provided in the first section of each of the four parts of the book with the narrative of a humble young Japanese-American man named Tadashi Sato who comes to Taliesin in the early 1930s to be employed as an architectural apprentice to Wright. Sato is put to work right away–in the kitchen, peeling potatoes, for six months–and his story gives a lens into the strange and tumultuous world of Taliesin in the 1930s, when Wright and Olgivanna held sway not just over matters architectural, but over everything from the apprentice's diets to their clothes to whom they could choose to date or marry. Needless to say, this is all fantastic subject matter for a writer as sly and intrepid as Boyle–there was not a moment in Wright's life that was not filled with scandal–and the result is a book that is memorable and juicy and completely fun to read, a fabulously entertaining portrait of a complicated and fascinating man who held sway over nearly everyone in his life.

About About T. C. Boyle:
T. C. Boyle has written 12 novels, including World's End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and Drop City, a National Book Award finalist, as well as eight short story collections. He lives near Santa Barbara, CA, and teaches at USC.