While T.C. Boyle is known as one of our greatest American novelists, he is also an acknowledged master of the short story and is perhaps at his funniest, his most moving, and his most surprising in the short form. In The Relive Box, Boyle's sharp wit and rich imagination combine with a penetrating social consciousness to produce raucous, poignant, and expansive short stories defined by an inimitable voice. From the collection's title story, featuring a Halcom X1520 Relive Box that allows users to experience anew almost any moment from their past to "The Five-Pound Burrito," the tale of a man aiming to build the biggest burrito in town, the twelve stories in this collection speak to the humor, the pathos, and the struggle that is part of being human while relishing the whimsy of wordplay and the power of a story well told. In stories that span a variety of styles and genres, Boyle addresses the enduring concerns of the human mind and heart while taking on timely social concerns. The Relive Box is an exuberant, linguistically dazzling effort from a "vibrant sensibility fully engaged with American society." (The New York Times)
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The New York Times Book Review - Deb Olin Unferth
In [his] exuberant new collection…Boyle uses a sly combination of sci-fi and nostalgia to look back while illuminating the future and all the coming catastrophes, all the ways civilization might be hurtling toward its final act—the droughts, floods, infections and other disastrous results of thousands of years of selfish human idiocy…He writes with the fluidity and grace of a master. His stories rock and move…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…Boyle's stories feel as if they're coming from the end of the world, from a time when we will finally be unable to live with what we are and what we have and what we have done.
Publishers Weekly
08/07/2017
Characteristic elements of Boyle’s fiction—ecology, technology, human nature, obsession, men and women disconnecting, the ordinary intermingled with the bizarre—are evident throughout his latest collection. The title story centers on a home entertainment console that enables users to relive moments from their past. A father, arguing with his 15-year-old daughter who wants more time at the “relive box,” tells her to do her homework and focus on the present, even as he is about to lose his job because he cannot stop reliving younger, more promising, days. “Are We Not Men?” depicts a future in which people custom-design children and pets through transgenic reproduction. Trouble begins when a maraschino-colored pit bull attacks a micropig. In “You Don’t Miss Your Water (’Til the Well Runs Dry),” a neighbor siphons off a California homeowner’s water during a drought, then, when the drought worsens, asks the homeowner to contribute money for a rain dancer. The creator of the titular dish in “The Five-Pound Burrito” experiences both success and hallucinations. In “She’s the Bomb,” a non-graduating college senior is desperate to delay the graduation ceremony, and in “Warrior Jesus” a cook channels his anger into disturbing comic-book superhero episodes. Settings for the 12 stories range from the Arctic to Argentina, protagonists from teenager to octogenarian. Boyle makes the incredible credible through detail, and his narrative voices convincing through rhythm and attitude. He can be funny, touching, or both, as when his characters face aging with characteristically fervent resistance. (Oct.)
Booklist (starred review)
Boyle’s substantial collection is funny, disarming, and crushing, haunting and beautiful.
BookPage
...A timely collection that explores the decline of nature and the takeover of technology. . . . Boyle is a master mood-mixer, and this funny-scary-sad collection is filled with stories to be savored.
Library Journal
05/15/2017
The author of a string of well-regarded novels, including the Pen Faulkner Award winner World's End, Boyle has written more than 100 stories and won the 2014 Rea Award for the Short Story. These 12 pieces exhibit Boyle's entertainingly off-kilter view of the world, as when a man aspires to assemble the town's biggest burrito. With a 50,000-copy first printing.
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2017-07-17
The prolific Boyle provides high entertainment in his latest story collection.With novels that are all over the map in subject matter as well as quality, Boyle has proven hit (The Road to Wellville, 1993; San Miguel, 2012) and miss (The Terranauts, 2016). His batting average is higher in this collection, in which stories about global warming, cybertechnology, and genetic engineering show him addressing not only the first part of the 21st century, but whatever future it may anticipate. The title story, which has already been anthologized in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, imagines our culture's next step in technological self-absorption: a device that allows people to revisit any part of their past history. For many, the Relive Box's utility begins as personalized pornography, but users find it so addictive that they're soon revisiting, for hours on end, pretty much any moment that allows them to escape the present. Narrating the story is a divorced father of a 15-year-old girl. He wants to limit her time on the device (where she turns back to a time when her family was intact), but mainly he wants to use it himself, to get lost in the box, "pinned here in this chair like an exhibit in a museum, blind to anything but the past, my past and nobody else's, not hers or her mother's, or the country's or the world's, but just mine." Many of the stories have narrators with blinders on, whether it's a mathematician convinced he's on the verge of a prizewinning breakthrough as his household suffers a plague of ants ("The Argentine Ant"), a cartoonist wreaking revenge on his girlfriend through the creation of "Warrior Jesus," or a "high midlist" novelist who had "written about death to the point of obsession" but now finds it hitting a little too close to home ("Subtract One Death"). Fans and new readers alike will appreciate Boyle's droll humor, eye for detail, and seemingly inexhaustible imagination.
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