"Side-stepping the Abyss" with T.C. Boyle

F and Z Block

HWK for the Weekend:

Read "Greasy Lake" by T. Coraghessan Boyle (Pages 125-131)

Be ready for a "Reading Reward"!


From The NY Times: 

From The Paris Review:

T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Art of Fiction No. 161

Interviewed by Elizabeth E. Adams

Boyle: 

"Well, in “Greasy Lake” we have three college kids on summer break who are locked into the invincibility of their cool— “We were all dangerous characters then,” the narrator says. They have some harrowing adventures of the teenage type and decide finally that no matter how bad you think you are, there is always someone a whole lot badder, and that the world, far from being your oyster, is a dangerous place of shadow and dislocation and death. Of course, I am that narrator, and I, like all my contemporaries, have been to Greasy Lake at one time or another, and yet all the incidents related are purely invented."

"It's about a  mile down on the dark side of Route 88." 
                                                           - Bruce Springsteen, "Spirit in the Night" (lyrics)