Much of the appeal of T. Coraghessan Boyle's novels and stories is in his creation of outrageous characters, bizarre situations, and deliberately inflated comparisons. Hip, erudite, and audacious, his fiction is widely praised for its black comedy, incongruous mixture of the mundane and the surreal, wildly inventive and intricate plots, manic energy, and dazzling wordplay. Although he has written a few pieces of realistic, psychologically probing fiction, almost all of his novels and stories have used comedy of one sort or another to serve moral purposes such as exposing greed, racism, and cultural insensitivity, satirizing contemporary foibles and obsessions, or deflating pomposity. Boyle has said that people devalue comic writing, which he defines as deadly serious; in an interview published in 1998 he pointed to Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (1955), which he called "a comic story in a desperate, frightening way."

Born Thomas John Boyle...