Excerpt from Drop City by T.C. Boyle, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

His name was Marco, and Norm Sender, the guy-cat - who'd inherited these forty-seven sun-washed acres above the Russian River and founded Drop City two years ago, had picked him up hitchhiking on the road out of Bolinas. Marco had built the treehouse from scrap lumber in a single afternoon - yesterday afternoon, in fact, while she was taking a siesta, meditating, pulling weeds and scrubbing communal pots - and when he reached down a bare arm to her she took hold of his hand and he pulled her up onto the branch alongside him as if she weighed no more than the circumambient air. She was in his lap, practically in his lap, and he was naked, but not hard, because this wasn't about that - this was about brother- and sisterhood, about being up in a tree at a certain hour of the morning and letting the world run itself without them. "This is Mount Olympus," he said, "and we are the gods and givers of light, and can you see that stain in the dirt down there on the puny earth where the goat girl made sacrifice?"

She could, and that was funny, the funniest thing in the world, goat's milk spilled in the dirt and the unadorned tin pail on its side and the goats bleating and dropping their pellets and some early riser - it was Reba, blowsy, blown, ever-mothering Reba - coming out of the kitchen in the main house with a pan of dishwater to drip judiciously on the marguerites in the kitchen garden. She laughed till her chest hurt and the twin points of oxygen deprivation began to dig talons into the back other head, and then he led her into the treehouse, six feet wide, eight long, with a carpet, a guitar, an unfurled sleeping bag and a roof of sweet-smelling cedar shake. And what was the first thing he did then? He rolled a joint, licked off the ends, and handed it to her.

Reprinted from Drop City by T. C. Boyle by permission of Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2003 T. C. Boyle, all rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.