With his easy blend of withering satire and pathos, T.C. Boyle introduces the bizarre into the everyday and expresses the frustration of living with the banal oppression of contemporary society. In his latest collection of short fiction, The Relive Box and Other Stories, Boyle explores lapses in meaningful communication and connection and the enhanced potential nowadays for selfishness and unresponsiveness to the consequences of our actions. Several stories could be called science fiction—if the rapid advance of technology hasn’t already reduced realism to a darkly comic subset of sci-fi. The
