Book summary

T. C. Boyle's first collection of short fiction includes "Heart of a Champion," in which a very smart Lassie has to keep saving a very dim-witted Timmy; "Bloodfall," about members of a commune watching dispassionately as blood instead of rain falls outside their windows; and the title story, about a woman involved in an affair with a chimp who reads Nietzsche. In DESCENT OF MAN, Boyle established himself as a wildly offbeat, madly talented new voice in American fiction.