Talk to Me

T.C. Boyle is an American novelist and short-story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published eighteen novels and twelve collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988 for his third novel, World's End, and the Prix Médicis étranger (France) in 1995 for The Tortilla Curtain. His novel Drop City was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award. Most recently, he has been the recipient of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Henry David Thoreau Prize, and the Jonathan Swift Prize for satire. He is a Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara.

"The novel is one of Boyle's recent best...the virtuoso...[Boyle's] masterly storytelling and shrewd social commentary have much in common with Charles Dickens; his laid-back, colloquial prose is maximalist rather than minimalist, with a touch of acute satire...If you're willing to suspend your disbelief about anthropomorphism, you'll enjoy this gripping and inescapably bittersweet book." - Boston Globe

"Talk to Me-told alternately from the point of view of the human and chimp characters-finds a sensitive issue and dives deep into an exploration that locks on and won't let go. . . . Against a backdrop of lurid news stories of chimps living with humans, where things go horribly wrong, this novel makes a visceral kind of sense and raises uncomfortable issues of human relationships with other species. Highly recommended." - Library Journal (starred review)

" If the measure of a good story is how often you think about it after you are done, then Talk to Me . . . hits the mark. . . . Talk to Me feels real and relevant " - BookTrib

"Boyle eloquently lays out the philosophical and ethical debates of raising chimps in a human household...Boyle poignantly exposes our anthropocentric biases while exploring the nature of consciousness and reminds us of the adage about the most dangerous species in the zoo being the humans." - Booklist