T.C. Boyle Wins Rea Award for the Short Story

Shelf Awareness

photo: Jamieson Fry

T.C. Boyle has won the 2014 Rea Award for the Short Story, which honors a writer who has made "a significant contribution to the discipline of the short story as an art form."

The jurors--Richard Bausch, Robert Olen Butler and Elizabeth Strout--called Boyle "a genuine American original. In more than 100 short stories and 10 story collections (plus 15 novels), Tom Boyle has furnished his own highly public and deluxe corner of contemporary American letters. His stories fairly glitter with imagination, an immense variety, hilarity, ambition and achieved talent.

 To his enduring credit and his readers' delight and amaze, less is not in the Boyle fictive vocabulary, though in his stories' dedication to matters of the heart and the human spirit, his finely tuned wit and his vision of our sometimes sad American fate have nothing of the cynical or the hopeless. His incomparable stories, even in their occasional dark interludes, always comes to us as a celebration. They redeem us and delight us and awaken our awareness as the finest writing should."

Founded by Michael M. Rea, the $30,000 award is sponsored by the Dungannon Foundation.