T.C. Boyle on Outside Looking In

T.C. Boyle has published fourteen novels and ten collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his novel World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger for The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, as well as the 2014 Henry David Thoreau award for excellence in nature writing. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His most recent novel, Outside Looking In (Ecco) is a provocative exploration of the first scientific and recreational forays into LSD and its mind-altering possibilities. A coterie of grad students at Harvard are drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology Ph.D. student and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers, and instead turns into a free-wheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living. Is LSD a belief system? Does it allow you to see God? Can the Loneys’ marriage—or any marriage, for that matter—survive the chaotic and sometimes orgiastic use of psychedelic drugs? Wry, witty, and wise, Outside Looking In is an utterly engaging and occasionally trippy look at the nature of reality, identity, and consciousness, as well as our seemingly infinite capacities for creativity, re-invention, and self-discovery.

V.V. Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, is the author of the novel Love Marriage (Random House, 2008), which was long-listed for the Orange Prize and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. She is a graduate of Harvard College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the MA program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Bollinger Fellow specializing in arts and culture journalism. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Non-Required Reading. She has served on the boards of the South Asian Journalists Association and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. In 2014, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the National Endowment for the Arts awarded her fellowships. In fall 2015, she began teaching at the University of Minnesota.

Whitney Terrell’s most recent novel, The Good Lieutenant, was selected as a best book of 2016 by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and Refinery 29. It was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. He is also the author of The Huntsman, a New York Times notable book, and The King of Kings County. He was an embedded reporter in Iraq during 2006 and 2010 and covered the war for The Washington Post Magazine, Slate, and NPR. His nonfiction has also appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, The New Republic, Literary Hub, and other publications. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast at Literary Hub.