Budding Prospects

A Pastoral

by T. C. Boyle

At 31, Felix Nasmith is a lifelong loser, but finally he gets his chance to shine when he and a couple of particularly manic friends (who include an ex-CIA agent who is now a gourmet cook) come up with a scheme to get rich quick by growing marijuana. Determined to harvest a half-million-dollar crop over the course of a summer, they get involved in a variety of nightmarish and/or comic events before their eventual downfall. T. C. Boyle's second novel (1984) is a kind of ironic pastoral, from which his hero emerges no richer but perhaps with a gain in wisdom.

Editions of Budding Prospects

ISBN 9780140299960	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Viking Pr	Date 1990	Price $1.00	Acceptable
ISBN 9780670194391	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Penguin Group USA	Date 1984	Price $7.57	Used - Good
ISBN 9780140081510	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Penguin	Date 1985	Price $3.98	Used - Acceptable

Publisher Notes

T. C. Boyle is one of the most inventive and wickedly funny short story writers at work today. Over the course of twenty-five years, Boyle has built up a body of short fiction that is remarkable in its range, richness, and exuberance. His stories have won accolades for their irony and black humor, for their verbal pyrotechnics, for their fascination with everything bizarre and queasy, and for the razor-sharp way in which they dissect America's obsession with image and materialism. Gathered together here are all of the stories that have appeared in his four previous collections, as well as seven that have never before appeared in book form. Together they comprise a book of small treasures, a definitive gift for Boyle fans and for every reader ready to discover the "ferocious, delicious imagination" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) of a "vibrant sensibility fully engaged with American society" (The New York Times).

Media Reviews

"The dope farm teaches him the merits of hard work as an end in itself--and it also makes him realize he wants something else from life than the money he'd craved at the start of the novel...lusty in every sense of the word, healthy, invigorating, and strong."

First Line

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat.

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