{"id":2463,"date":"2015-04-16T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-16T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alibris.com\/blog\/?p=2463"},"modified":"2015-04-16T10:55:12","modified_gmt":"2015-04-16T17:55:12","slug":"interview-with-tc-boyle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alibris.com\/blog\/interview-with-tc-boyle\/","title":{"rendered":"An Interview with TC Boyle"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image by Jamieson Fry, \u00a9 2013<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Catching up with TC Boyle before His Award at the LA Times Festival of Books<\/h2>\n

If you’ve ever wanted to hear this blogger giggle like a schoolgirl, look no further than this interview with PEN\/Faulkner award-winner TC Boyle<\/a>. He’s the author of 24 books and countless stories, and his works have been translated into more than two dozen languages.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>Boyle is in California for this year’s LA Times Festival of Books<\/a>, where he will be honored with the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement<\/a>. I’ve attended the festival myself in years past, so I can tell you it’s huge: more than 150,000 people convene over 500 authors, celebrities, musicians, artists and chefs. In fact it’s the largest literary and cultural festival in America.<\/p>\n

Boyle’s most recent book The Harder They Come<\/em><\/a> is an exploration of American violence. In the interview we talk about writing without a map of the plot. He often works with an epigraph to guide the story, and in this novel his muse was D.\u2009H. Lawrence, with this epigraph: \u201cThe essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.\u201d Is that true? The Harder They Come <\/em>seeks the answer by exploring the acts of violence committed by a liberal Vietnam vet and his mentally-unstable survivalist son.<\/p>\n

TC Boyle took some time out of his busy touring schedule to sit down on a park bench in Santa Barbara and answer a few of my questions. He spoke of his writing and editing process, the dangers of political writing, how he researches his historical fiction, and more. I mostly giggled.
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