From boys to men and back again
Discover the best books for boys transitioning to men and back again. Explore our curated list of must-read titles that inspire, educate, and entertain young men on their journey.
Book
Wonder Boys
by Michael Chabon
Grady Tripp is a pot-smoking middle aged novelist who has stalled on a 2611 page opus titled Wonder Boys. His student James Leer is a troubled young writer obsessed by Hollywood suicides and at work on his own first novel. Grady's bizarre editor Terry Crabtree and another student, Hannah Green, come together in his wildly comic, moving, and finally profound search for an ending to his book and a purpose to his life.
Book
The Wishbones
by Tom Perrotta
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.
Book
Election
by Tom Perrotta
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Leftovers and Tracy Flick Can't Win comes a darkly hilarious novel about a high school election that brings out the worst in everyone—the basis for the film starring Reese Witherspoon! 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, aka “Mr. M.,” thinks the students deserve better. So he persuades Paul Warren—a well-liked, good-hearted jock—to throw in his hat. 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. The idea was to educate the students at this suburban New Jersey school in the democratic process and the American way. But with all the sex scandals, smear campaigns, and behind-the-scenes power brokers at Winwood High, it doesn’t look as if they need any lessons....
Book
Rabbit Angstrom
by John Updike
The four novels in the acclaimed Rabbit series—including the Pulitzer Prize winners Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest—brought together in a single volume, from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century. When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school athlete. Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four magnificent novels—the athleticism of an imagination possessed of the ability to lay bare, with a seemingly effortless animal grace, the enchantments and disenchantments of life. Updike revisited his hero toward the end of each of the following decades in the second half of this American century; and in each of the subsequent novels, as Rabbit, his wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, and the people around them grow, these characters take on the lineaments of our common existence. In prose that is one of the glories of contemporary literature, Updike has chronicled the frustrations and ambiguous triumphs, the longuers, the loves and frenzies, the betrayals and reconciliations of our era. He has given us our representative American story. This Rabbit Angstrom volume is composed of the following novels: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest.
Book
Staggerford
by Jon Hassler
Portrays the closely-intertwined and often troubled lives of residents in the small town as seen through the eyes of Miles Pruitt, a much respected high school teacher
Book
The Sportswriter
by Richard Ford
In this “powerful” blockbuster of a novel (The New York Times), the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day introduces his most beloved character, failed novelist turned sportswriter Frank Bascombe, during an Easter weekend, as he moves through the great losses of his life. As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people—men, mostly—who live entirely within themselves. This is a condition that Frank himself aspires to. But at thirty-eight, he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses of a career, a son, and a marriage. In the course of the Easter week in which Ford's moving novel transpires, Bascombe will end up losing the remnants of his familiar life, though with his spirits soaring.
Book
Independence Day
by Richard Ford
The Pulitzer-Prize Winning novel for 1996.In this visionary sequel to The Sportswriter, Richard Ford deepens his portrait of one of the most unforgettable characters in American fiction, and in so doing gives us an indelible portrait of America.Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an "Existence Period," selling real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life.Independence Day is a moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, conducted by a novelist of astonishing empathy and perception.
Book
The Professor of Desire
by Philip Roth
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral—"a thoughtful...elegant" (The New York Times Book Review) and often hilarous novel about the dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire. As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself "a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes." Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be—or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a novel that "ranks among the major achievements in the literature of our time" (Village Voice).
Book
The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
Originally published in 1953, Saul Bellow's modern picaresque tale grandly illustrates twentieth-century man's restless pursuit of an elusive meaning. Augie March, a young man growing up in Chicago during the Great Depression, doesn't understand success on other people's terms. Fleeing to Mexico in search of something to fill his restless soul and soothe his hunger for adventure, Augie latches on to a wild succession of occupations until his journey brings him full circle. Yet beneath Augie's carefree nature lies a reflective person with a strong sense of responsibility to both himself and others, who in the end achieves a success of his own making. A modern-day Columbus, Augie March is a man searching not for land but for self and soul and, ultimately, for his place in the world.