Though popular novels such as East Is East and The Road To Wellville have rightly established T.C. Boyle as one of the most cutting and prolific American satirists, his virtuoso prose style occasionally edges into caricature, a tendency that can get wearying in the long form. Short fiction, on the other hand, plays directly to his strengths, as the massive T.C. Boyle Stories makes abundantly clear. A gathering of 68 stories, including the contents of his four previous anthologies, as well as seven pieces never before published in book form, this collection skips fluidly from one delicious vignette to the next, covering a daunting range of subjects, periods, and tones. In Boyle's bitter love stories, people (and animals) make outrageous sacrifices for fleeting moments of pleasure: A man has to don a full-body condom to make love to his hygienically obsessed girlfriend ("Modern Love"), the relationship of the two superpowers hangs in the balance as Dwight Eisenhower and Nina Khrushchev steal away for a tryst ("Ike And Nina"), and Lassie abandons her boy-in-peril to take up with a malicious coyote ("Heart Of A Champion"). But Boyle's signature clowning is set aside in much of his best work, including "If The River Was Whiskey," an unsentimental but heartbreaking story about a boy's fishing excursion with his alcoholic father, and "Greasy Lake," a rock-driven rite of passage that stands as the adolescent male equivalent to Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" In "Stones In My Passway, Hellhound On My Trail," Boyle evokes the dark world of blues guitarist Robert Johnson with incredible acuity and power, and in "The Overcoat II," he takes a serio-comic look at the effects of Glasnost on a dedicated Communist worker. With only one exception (the self-indulgent "I Dated Jane Austen"), T.C. Boyle Stories stands as a forceful, consistently entertaining collection, a bid for canonization made in more than gross pounds.