Education
He graduated from Occidental College and Long Island University.
( Four old men—John, Gino, Larry, and Frank—have been war...)
Four old men—John, Gino, Larry, and Frank—have been warehoused at "the Manor," a long-eroded home for the forgotten. The men take turns telling stories, stalling death as they relive pivotal parts of their pasts. Outside, the cliff crumbles and a lighthouse slips toward the sea. John, in particular, enthralls the others with his tale of Tampico, Mexico, where he met an Indian woman named Chepa who owned a house at the edge of a mountain wilderness. She was his first love—and his first lesson in the dangers of foreign intrigue. But his is not the only memory haunted by mysteries born in Mexico. Sick of waiting for death, stirred by the shifting ground beneath their feet, the Manor's residents finally resolve to quit that place and head out for Tampico. With inexorable pull, and exquisite scenes that could only come from Toby Olson, Tampico celebrates a sublime band of calaveras, "those skeleton messengers of mortality," who seek self-discovery even as their lives are ending.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0292718276/?tag=2022091-20
( The Bitter Half opens in 1935 in Pearce, Arizona, where...)
The Bitter Half opens in 1935 in Pearce, Arizona, where Chris Pollard, a famed if eccentric authority on jail breaks, has been called in to investigate the case of The Kid, an inmate who has broken out of every prison in which he has been held. The Kid appears and disappears, eluding his pursuers, while at Pollard’s Wisconsin estate a rag-tag group of travelers and refugees come together, including a black family from Florida, a female candy store owner known as Bo Peep, and a troupe of down-and-out entertainers. As Pollard and The Kid traverse the wasteland of Depression-era America, an obsessive, evasive, and erotic attraction grows between the two, culminating in a final confrontation at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. In revealing their tangled attraction and intertwined fates, The Bitter Half offers a striptease of masks and mysteries, slowly revealing a web of seductions, assumptions, and miscues of desire. Praise for Toby Olson’s fiction:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008W3PZAM/?tag=2022091-20
He graduated from Occidental College and Long Island University.
Through high school and his four years in the Navy as a surgical technician, he lived in California, Arizona, and Texas. He co-founded and taught at the Aspen Writers" hop, and at Long Island University and The New School Foreign Social Research, and since 1975 Temple University. Recently, he has collaborated with composer Paul Epstein, including chamber music, songs, a short story set for voice and piano, and two chamber operas, Dorit, and Chihuahua.
Both operas were performed by the Temple University Opera Theater.
He lives in Philadelphia and North Truro, on Cape Cod.
( The Bitter Half opens in 1935 in Pearce, Arizona, where...)
( Four old men—John, Gino, Larry, and Frank—have been war...)