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Greasy Lake (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

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“Greasy Lake,” the title story of Boyle's best-received collection of stories, takes its title and its epigraph—“It's about a mile down on the dark side of Route 88”—from Bruce Springsteen's song “Spirit in the Night.” The story focuses on three nineteen-year-old men living in a time (probably the 1960's) when, the narrator says, it was good to be bad, when young people cultivated decadence like a taste. Driving the narrator's family station wagon, they search for some escape from their suburban shopping-center lives at Greasy Lake, where, on the banks of festering...

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