Returned to TC Boyle after a long while. I was thumbing through Outside Looking In, a book I've read a couple of times, then went back and read The Shape of a Teardrop, published in The New Yorker (a couple-three years back), and decided to take the plunge with his collected stories (
Stories II); he has two volumes (that's a lot of writing, esp. given the number of novels he's written too); there are a fair bit of zoological and even chemistry-related terms in the stories, which then got me reading about
biological magnification, which others call a "metabolic shift" on the planetary level.