Great literary fiction for guys
Discover the best literary fiction books for men. Explore gripping, thought-provoking novels perfect for guys who love deep stories and rich characters.
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The Here and Now
by Robert Cohen
As Samuel Karnish watches his career run aground and his marriage disintegrate, he finds himself on a flight to his best friend's third wedding, thrust into an awkward friendship with a young Hasidic couple from Brooklyn--a friendship that leads him on a strange odyssey and sends him reeling toward what may be his truest self. National ads/media.
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A Question of Attraction
by David Nicholls
A brilliant romantic comedy, set in England in the 1980s, is about a young man discovering the world and himself during his first year at university.
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Therapy
by Steven Schwartz
Schwartz's storytelling gifts draw the reader achingly close to the characters, as their lives crisscross in and out of therapy. With humor and compassion, this deeply affecting novel shows that everyday life is often the true struggle and the ultimate triumph. A quiet celebration of the miraculous and the mundane.--Chicago Tribune.
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High Fidelity
by Nick Hornby
From the bestselling author of About a Boy, A Long Way Down and Dickens and Prince, a wise and hilarious novel about love, heartbreak, and rock and roll. “I've always loved Nick Hornby, and the way he writes characters and the way he thinks. It's funny and heartbreaking all at the same time.”—Zoë Kravitz Rob is a pop music junkie who runs his own semi-failing record store. His girlfriend, Laura, has just left him for the guy upstairs, and Rob is both miserable and relieved. After all, could he have spent his life with someone who has a bad record collection? Rob seeks refuge in the company of the offbeat clerks at his store, who endlessly review their top five films; top five Elvis Costello songs; top five episodes of Cheers. Rob tries dating a singer, but maybe it’s just that he’s always wanted to sleep with someone who has a record contract. Then he sees Laura again. And Rob begins to think that life with kids, marriage, barbecues, and soft rock CDs might not be so bad.
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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.
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Joe College
by Tom Perrotta
For Danny, a Yale junior and the sympathetic everyman hero of this novel, now in paperback, Spring Break means two weeks behind the wheel of the Roach Coach, his father's lunch truck. Danny uses the time to make sense of his love life, which gets pretty complicated. A "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year.
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My Life in Heavy Metal
by Steve Almond
This first collection of 12 powerful stories takes a clear-eyed view of relationships between young men and women who have come of age in an era without innocence. A top five Book Sense 76 title.
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Skipped Parts
by Tim Sandlin
In 1963, 13-year-old Sam Callahan and his tart-tongued, divorced, misbehavingmother, Lydia, must cope as best they can after they are banished to the hicktown of GroVont, Wyoming, by Lydia's Southern gentleman father.
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The Lost Legends of New Jersey
by Frederick Reiken
A story of teenage life and love in suburban New Jersey chronicles the relationship between Anthony Rubin, a young Jewish teen whose own family is falling apart, and his neighbor, Juliette, the daughter of a reputed Mafioso.
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Inspired Sleep
by Robert Cohen
"With a keen, panoramic eye, Inspired Sleep encompasses everything from the slippery evasions of love to the intricate network of commerce that binds together Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, and managed care.
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About a Boy
by Nick Hornby
A wise, hilarious novel from the beloved, award-winning author of Dickens and Prince, Funny Girl and High Fidelity Will Freeman may have discovered the key to dating success: If the simple fact that they were single mothers meant that gorgeous women – women who would not ordinarily look twice a Will – might not only be willing, but enthusiastic about dating him, then he was really onto something. Single mothers – bright, attractive, available women – thousands of them, were all over London. He just had to find them. SPAT: Single Parents – Alone Together. It was a brilliant plan. And Will wasn’t going to let the fact that he didn’t have a child himself hold him back. A fictional two-year-old named Ned wouldn’t be the first thing he’d invented. And it seems to go quite well at first, until he meets an actual twelve-year-old named Marcus, who is more than Will bargained for…
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The Calligrapher
by Edward Docx
This fresh, original, altogether winning first novel is centered on a young London calligrapher named Jasper--an engaging, intelligent serial seducer and a breaker of hearts.
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The Daughters of Simon Lamoreaux
by David Long
Miles Fanning was to meet his girlfriend Carly, but she never showed up that evening, and was never seen again. Many years later Carly's sister Julia and Fanning begin a phone and e-mail correspondence concerning Carly's disappearance.
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Two Guys from Verona
by James Kaplan
Tides change for two male friends when they meet at their 25th high school reunion to discover one is facing death and the other one is experiencing life for the first time.
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Bad Haircut
by Tom Perrotta
The protagonist is Buddy, a teenager from New Jersey, and the stories follow his progress from an idealistic boy scout to a conformist giving in to peer pressure. A tale of growing up.
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The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
by Chris Fuhrman
In trouble with the principal of their Catholic school, eighth-graders Francis Doyle, Tim Sullivan, and their closest three friends try to create a diversion to postpone the inevitable.
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The Odd Sea
by Frederick Reiken
“A haunting first novel that takes a horrifying family calamity and turns it into a form of magic.”—The New York Times On a sunny spring morning, sixteen-year-old Ethan Shumway walks down his gravel driveway, turns the bend, and vanishes without a trace. As police search for clues, Ethan's devastated family and friends—from his parents and four siblings to the older woman who was more than a teacher to Ethan—grapple for answers in the teenager's enigmatic life. As this elusive mystery slowly weaves its way into the fabric of the family, Ethan's younger brother, Philip, becomes the last, most stubborn searcher of all: a boy caught between the power and fragility of youth, between the bonds and fissures of family, searching for understanding in the unbearable presence of loss. Praise for The Odd Sea “A powerful debut novel.”—People “[An] extraordinarily good first novel . . . The story has a dark, dreamlike quality, and author Reiken tells it with no melodrama nor any word out of place.”—Time “A luminous parable about growing up, about the necessity of dealing with inevitable loss and questions that cannot be answered . . . Reiken is a smoothly seductive storyteller. He has talent for telling but not telling, for revealing only enough information to whet our appetite.”—Newsday
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Trials of the Monkey
by Matthew Chapman
"When Darwin called his second book The Descent of Man instead of The Ascent of Man he was thinking of his progeny." So declares Darwin's great-great grandson Matthew Chapman as he leaves behind his stressful career as a Hollywood screenwriter and travels to Dayton, Tennessee where in 1925 creationist opposition to the teaching of evolution in schools was played out in a famous legal drama, the Scopes Monkey Trial. The purpose of this journey is to see if opinions have changed in the seventy- five intervening years. A defiant atheist, Chapman is confronted not only by the fundamentalist beliefs that continue to banish the theory of evolution but by his own spiritual malaise as the outward journey becomes an inward quest, a tragicomic "accidental memoir". "First there was Charles Darwin, two yards long and nobody's fool. Then there was his son, my great-grandfather, Sir Francis Darwin, an eminent botanist. Then came my grandmother Frances, a modest poet who spent a considerable amount of time in rest-homes for depression From her issued my beloved mother, Clare, who was extremely short, failed to complete medical school, and eventually became an alcoholic. Then we get down to me. I'm in the movie business." Trials of the Monkey combines travel writing and reportage, as Chapman records his encounters in the South, with history and the accidental memoir of a man full of mid-life doubts in a genre-breaking first book that is darkly funny, provocative and poignant.
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The Funnies
by J. Robert Lennon
The Mix family, a motley crew of troubled souls who have been forever immortalized in their father's popular comic strip, must learn to inhabit the real world when their father dies and the division of his estate becomes an issue.
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
by Mark Haddon
Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.
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The Best a Man Can Get
by John O'Farrell
A hilarious and touching debut novel-in the seriocomic Nick Hornby tradition-that demonstrates why marriage, fatherhood, and maturity don't always arrive on a synchronized schedule. Michael Adams is a composer of advertising jingles who shares a flat with three other men in their late twenties. Days are spent lying in bed, playing computer and musical trivia games, and occasionally doing a spot of work. And, when he feels like it, he crosses the river and goes back to his unsuspecting wife and children. For Michael is living a double life. He escapes from the exhausting misery of babies by telling his wife he has to pull an all-nighter at work or travel away on business. And while she is valiantly coping on her own, he is just a few miles away in his male paradise, doing all the stupid, pointless, gloriously enjoyable stuff that most men with small children can only dream about. He thinks he can lead this double life indefinitely, until the inevitable slip exposes him and threatens to blow his marriage to kingdom come. The Best a Man Can Get is a darkly comic confessional that peers deeply (and amusingly) into the soul of the contemporary male, divided between the pull of family and the dream of escape. Graced by a flawless eye for detail and impeccable timing, it offers a generous allotment of both belly laughs and shocks of recognition for men and women alike. John O'Farrell has finally given readers the sparkling and candid novel that fatherhood needs and deserves.
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The Varieties of Romantic Experience
by Robert Cohen
In the title story of this dazzling comic collection, a psychology professor delivers a lecture that segues into a confession of an embarrassing affair. An elderly man worried that his life is going downhill heads to an Indian casino in hopes of some relief. A recently divorced man arrives half an hour late to a bachelor party to find that the frightened groom has sent everyone else home. A reclusive writer visits a small college at the invitation of a former student, and nothing goes right. Funny and generous, these stories are virtuoso performances–moving forays into disconcertingly familiar territory that line the often slippery boundaries between masculinity and humanity in American life.
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Troublemakers
by John McNally
Stories express the everyday aches and common cruelties of life that people endure and witness, from a wife stranding her husband on a roof, to a man sawing his kitchen into little pieces, to a man taking out his anger on a dead deer.
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About the Author
by John Colapinto
Just how did Cal Cunningham -- a twenty-five-year-old bookstore stockboy who is new to Manhattan and who has never written anything -- publish a bestselling novel that sells to the movies for a million dollars? A mysterious roommate, a timely bike accident, and the rapacious literary agent Blackie Yaeger all play a role in Cal's success. Deception, blackmail, and murder all play a role in his desperate bid to hold on to it. And About the Author is his first-person account of how he performed this remarkable feat.