Works by
Tom Perrotta
(Writer)

Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies (1995)
Tom made his literary debut with this short story collection, earning critical praise and comparisons to Salinger, Carver, and Roth by taking readers to New Jersey in the 1970s as a boy named Buddy struggles with the timeless mysteries of sex, death, parents-and of course, bad haircuts.

The Wishbones (1997)
Everything is going pretty well for Dave Raymond. He's 31, but he still feels young. He's playing guitar with the Wishbones, a New Jersey wedding band, and while it isn't exactly the Big Time, it is music. He has a roof over his head...well, it's his parents' roof, but they don't hassle him much. Life isn't perfect. But it isn't bad. Not bad at all. But then he has to blow it all by proposing to his girlfriend.

Election (1998)
Tracy Flick wants to be President of Winwood High. She's one of those ambitious girls who finds time to do it all: edit the yearbook, star in the musical, sleep with her English teacher. But another teacher, staunch idealist Jim McAllister, thinks the students deserve better. So he persuades Paul Warren, a good-hearted jock, to throw his hat into the student council election. But that puts Paul's sister Tammy in a snit. So she runs too, on an apathy platform-before starting a real campaign—to get herself kicked out of school.

Joe College (2000)
Populated by a vividly drawn cast of characters—Yale students and lunch truck drivers alike—Joe College evokes two radically different worlds through Tom Perrotta's distinctive combination of humor, sweetness, and telling detail. Joe College is a serious comic novel about love, higher education, and food service, a uniquely American story about the mistakes we sometimes make and the illusions we have to shed on the way to finding our place in the world.

Little Children (2004)
Meet Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms at the playground, and his wife, Kathy, a documentary filmmaker envious of the connection Todd has forged with their toddler son. And there's Sarah, a lapsed feminist surprised to find she's become a typical wife in a traditional marriage, and her husband, Richard, who is becoming more and more involved with an internet fantasy life than with his own wife and child. And then there's Mary Ann, who has life all figured out, down to a scheduled roll in the hay with her husband every Tuesday at nine P.M.

They all raise their kids in the kind of quiet suburb where nothing ever seems to happen—until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could ever have imagined.

Now a major motion picture.

Lit Riffs: Writers "Cover" Songs They Love (2004), Matthew Miele, ed.
Following in the footsteps of the late great Lester Bangs -- the most revered and irreverent of rock 'n' roll critics -- twenty-four celebrated writers have penned stories inspired by great songs. Just as Bangs cast new light on a Rod Stewart classic with his story "Maggie May," about a wholly unexpected connection between an impressionable young man and an aging, alcoholic hooker, the diverse, electrifying stories here use songs as a springboard for a form dubbed the lit riff.

Alongside Bangs's classic work, you'll find stories by J.T. LeRoy, who puts a recovering teenage drug abuser in a dentist's chair with nothing but the Foo Fighters's "Everlong" -- blaring through the P.A. -- to fight the pain; Jonathan Lethem, whose narrator looks back on his lost innocence just as an extramarital affair careens to an end -- this to the tune "Speeding Motorcycle" as recorded by Yo La Tengo; and Jennifer Belle, who envisions a prequel to Paul Simon's "Graceland" -- one that takes place at a children's birthday party replete with a real live kangaroo.