Great literary fiction for guys 2
Discover top literary fiction books for men with our curated list of must-read novels. Perfect for guys who love deep, thought-provoking stories and classic male protagonists.
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Little Children
by Tom Perrotta
A group of young suburban parents, including a stay-at-home dad, a former feminist, and an over-structured mom, finds its sleepy existence shattered when a convicted child molester moves back into town and two of the parents have an affair.
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Everything Changes
by Jonathan Tropper
As his wedding day approaches, Zachary King begins to wonder if his entire life might be a big mistake, doubts that are only enhanced by the arrival of Norm, Zack's freewheeling, overbearing father, after a twenty-year absence.
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Alternative Atlanta
by Marshall Boswell
"For thirty-year-old Gerald Brinkman, life in Atlanta in the year 1996 - the summer of the Olympics - doesn't feel half bad. Writing reviews of basement rock bands for an alternative paper, Gerald has carefully avoided getting a real job, while watching his old friends from grad school start careers, marriages, and affairs - often with each other. But in this one life-changing summer, something is about to happen that will shake Gerald out of his complacency forever." "Gerald's father, his brilliant, vagabond, and utterly unhelpful father, wants to come and stay with him "for a while." Ever since childhood, Gerald has tried to bury his relationship with his father under a life of carefully crafted wrong turns. And now Paul Brinkman has shown up with trash bags full of belongings, a medical crisis, and an unbearable confession to make. But Gerald knows one thing for sure: He doesn't want to hear it. Try as he might to stop it, the future is bearing down on him. A job is being dangled in New York. A secret from his past is waiting to be revealed. An ex-girlfriend is suddenly sending mixed signals. And in one moment in one summer in the city of Atlanta, everything is about to change forever. When it does, Gerald is going to have a whole new vision of who he is, who his father and friends are, and what he must do next."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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Please Don't Come Back from the Moon
by Dean Bakopoulos
When his father disappears along with several other men from their blue-collar Detroit neighborhood, sixteen-year-old Michael Smolij witnesses the effects of large-scale abandonment on the community's wives and mothers and, in the years that follow, experiences along with his friends the same restlessness that carried away their fathers. A first novel. 25,000 first printing.
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Sideways
by Rex Pickett
Sideways is the story of two friends-Miles and Jack-going away together for the last time to steep themselves in everything that makes it good to be young and single: pinot, putting, and prowling bars. In the week before Jack plans to marry, the pair heads out from Los Angeles to the Santa Ynez wine country. For Jack, the tasting tour is Seven Days to D-Day, his final stretch of freedom. For Miles--who has divorced his wife, is facing an uncertain career and has lost his passion for living-the trip is a weeklong opportunity to evaluate his past, his future and himself. A raucous and surprising novel filled with wonderful details about wine, Sideways is also a thought-provoking and funny book about men, women, and human relationships.
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House of Sand and Fog
by Andre Dubus
A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title, that may also include a folder with miscellaneous notes, dicussion questions, biographical information, and reading lists to assist book group dicussion leaders.
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Aloft
by Chang-rae Lee
Lee burst on the scene with "Native Speaker," which won numerous awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award. Now, with "Aloft," Lee has expanded his range and proves himself a master storyteller, able to observe his characters' flaws and weaknesses and, at the same time, celebrate their humanity.
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Lit Life
by Kurt Wenzel
Set in Manhattan and the Hamptons, Lit Life is a wickedly funny and provocative debut novel about the passions and perils of the writing life that the Los Angeles Times calls irresponsibly intoxicating.
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The Book of Ralph
by John McNally
From the award-winning author of "Troublemakers" comes this dazzling coming-of-age tale that speaks volumes about the wondrous and antic lives of teenage boys.
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Love Monkey
by Kyle Smith
Many men aim high; Tom Farrell dares to be average. While his friends accumulate wedding rings, mortgages, and even, alarmingly, babies, Tom still lives alone in his rented apartment with nothing but condiments and alcohol in his refrigerator. He spends Saturday mornings watching cartoons and eating Cocoa Puffs out of an Empire Strikes Back bowl, and devotes the rest of the weekend to his other favorite hobbies: sports and girls. His credo, to think and act like a thirteen-year-old boy at all times, has worked well enough to land him a decent job writing headlines for the New York Tabloid. But neither his personal life nor his professional life has any forward momentum; he's occupied the same cubicle since the first George Bush was president and is currently "between girlfriends." At thirty-two, it starts to occur to him: There's a fine line between picky and loser. Enter a sly, beautiful coworker named Julia. After a few torrid dates, Tom is hooked. "She's like cleaning behind my refrigerator. A once-in-a-lifetime thing." But the closer he gets to Julia, the more elusive she becomes. Frustrated, Tom seeks the dubious advice of his buddy Shooter, a shallow sexual gladiator, and wonders why he keeps getting into arguments with Bran, his smart, sarcastic "default date." But then tragedy strikes, and everyone's attitudes toward life and love change -- and even Tom begins to see himself in a new light. By turns riotous and tenderhearted, Kyle Smith's Love Monkey is the most candid and excruciatingly funny exploration of the male mind and libido since High Fidelity.
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The Monk Downstairs
by Tim Farrington
Rebecca Martin is a single mother with an apartment to rent and a sense that she has used up her illusions. I had the romantic thing with my first husband, thank you very much, she tells a hapless suitor. I'm thirty-eight years old, and I've got a daughter learning to read and a job I don't quite like. I don't need the violin music. But when the new tenant in her in-law apartment turns out to be Michael Christopher, on the lam after twenty years in a monastery and smack dab in the middle of a dark night of the soul, Rebecca begins to suspect that she is not as thoroughly disillusioned as she had thought. Her daughter, Mary Martha, is delighted with the new arrival, as is Rebecca's mother, Phoebe, a rollicking widow making a new life for herself among the spiritual eccentrics of the coastal town of Bolinas. Even Rebecca's best friend, Bonnie, once a confirmed cynic in matters of the heart, urges Rebecca on. But none of them, Rebecca feels, understands how complicated and dangerous love actually is. As her unlikely friendship with the ex-monk grows toward something deeper, and Michael wrestles with his despair while adjusting to a second career flipping hamburgers at McDonald's, Rebecca struggles with her own temptation to hope. But it is not until she is brought up short by the realities of life and death that she begins to glimpse the real mystery of love, and the unfathomable depths of faith. Beautifully written and playfully engaging, this novel. is about one man wrestling with his yearning for a life of contemplation and the need for a life of action in the world. But it's Rebecca's spirit, as well as her relationships with Mary Martha, Phoebe, her irresponsible surfer ex-husband Rory -- and, of course, the monk downstairs -- that makes this story shine.
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The Obituary Writer
by Porter Shreve
In 1989, twenty-two-year-old Gordie Hatch takes a job as an obituary writer for the St. Louis Independent, but an encounter with young widow Alice Whiting leads him on an obsessive quest in search of the truth behind the Whiting family.
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After Lucy
by Daniel Jones
Porter Ellis once believed he would be a famous painter -- until a decade of eking out a living as a graphic designer crushed his dreams. Suddenly his wife, Lucy, dies of breast cancer, and Porter discovers that he can't deal with her parents. Sneaking out of town with his twelve-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son, he sets out on an adventure that he hopes will mend their broken hearts. Along the way, chance encounters with a number of eccentric and amusing characters help him realize that he must face his sorrow and restart his life. Hilarious and poignant, After Lucy is a wild ride through family relationships, emotions, and hopes for the future.
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The Organ Builder
by Robert Cohen
"Disillusioned with his life and troubled by a mysterious past, corporate lawyer Hesh Freeman agrees to help two filmmakers with their project about his long-lost father, who helped build the A-bomb"--Amazon.com.
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Man and Boy
by Terence Rattigan
Harry Silver has it all: a beautiful wife, a wonderful son, a great job in the media--but in one night he throws it all away. Just yesterday Harry gave himself a shiny red sports car for his thirtieth birthday. Today he faces the baffling questions of a suddenly single dad: --How do you wash a four-year-old's hair? --Should he eat green spaghetti for breakfast? --What do you tell his Mommy from the emergency room phone? Harry has to bring up his child alone, look after his parents, work out his relationships and hold down a job. As millions of women have discovered before him, that is not as simple as it may have seemed.
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Motherless Brooklyn
by Jonathan Lethem
When Lionel's friend is killed, he is forced to delve into the complex, shadowy web of relationships, threats, and favors that make up the Brooklyn world he thought he knew so well.
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The Muse Asylum
by David Czuchlewski
“An ingeniously plotted postmodernist mystery. . . . David Czuchlewski writes with imagination, vision, and style.”—Joyce Carol Oates Who is Horace Jacob Little, and what is he trying to hide? Legend has is that not even his agent had met him, that they communicated via post office box. Horace Jacob Little had insisted on blank covers for all his books. . . . No one knew what he looked like or where he lived. . . . I used to imagine him: a death-row inmate, a mild-mannered accountant, a disfigured cripple. . . . He was none of these, as it turned out, nothing my imagination could conjure. Andrew Wallace, recent Princeton graduate and troubled genius, spends his days in the Overlook Psychiatric Institute—the Muse Asylum—writing about a dark conspiracy against him engineered by the elusive author Horace Jacob Little. When fellow classmate Jake Burnett, a novice reporter, arrives on the hospital grounds to visit Andrew, he learns that Andrew’s problems run much deeper than simple paranoia and obsession. Along with Lara Knowles, the girl they both love, they try to break through the shadows of the enigmatic Horace Jacob Little. Instead, they find themselves caught in a twisted game of reflections and reversals, where each seems to be pursuing the other—for love, for success, or for a far more sinister purpose. “[A] cleverly devised, sharply composed, entertaining and moving novel.”—The Wall Street Journal
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The Sleep-Over Artist: Fiction
by Thomas Beller
Beller's stories trace the life of Alex Fader, New Yorker, from age six to age 30. He drifts in and out of relationships. goes to London after losing his job and meets glamorous Katrina, a soon-to-be-divorced mother, and begins a complicated long-distance affair. Each of the stories stands alone, but their cumulative effect tells the boy-to-man story of Alex's scattered life.
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A Certain Chemistry
by Mil Millington
Brooding, self-loathing Tom Cartwright is a modestly successful ghostwriter whose ability to spell correctly and meet his deadlines has landed him the job of writing the autobiography of the wildly popular soap-opera star Georgina Nye. His imbibing, chain-smoking agent is swooning, and his offbeat, sweetly supportive live-in girlfriend of five years, Sara, is ecstatic—new carpets! Yet even as he feverishly pens (read: mostly makes up) Georgina’s “straight-from-the-heart” life story (he’s thinking maybe a thoughtful, feminist angle), he is lusting for Georgina herself. Soon Tom—poor, misguided, painfully careening Tom—thinks he can have it all: a woman at home who loves him, and a hot, panting affair with a television diva. With a little planning, can it really be so hard? In this clever, rollicking tale of sexual misadventures and the modern man, Mil Millington hilariously explores the sometimes foolish choices mere mortals can make when that certain chemistry forces us to think not with our heads or our hearts but with . . . well, things that usually lead us straight into serious trouble.
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Waxwings
by Jonathan Raban
A novel set in Seattle at the turn of the millennium follows two immigrants as they struggle to achieve the American dream in the midst of terrorism, economic fireworks, and unrest in the streets.
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Sorrow Floats
by Tim Sandlin
After a frightening accident while she's in another drunken stupor, Maurey decides to set off on a road trip with two recovering alcoholics to get her life together once and for all.
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Officer Friendly and Other Stories
by Lewis Robinson
The stories in this sparkling debut collection all take place in the state of Maine -- which, in the hands of this madly talented young writer, quickly comes to stand for the state we're all in when we face the moments that change our lives forever. Two young hooligans have to decide whether to help the cop who has a heart attack while he's chasing them, or to cut and run. A young man at a party of coastal aristocrats has to deal with the surreal request to put a rich old coot out of his misery. Is a son going to abet his truck-driver father's art larceny or not? Should an amateur fighter take on the archetypal tough guy? Can the young father defend his family if the diver helping to free the tangled propeller of their boat turns out to be a real threat? With humor, edginess, an eye for human idiosyncrasy, and a nice relish for menace, Lewis Robinson shows us the lives of the wealthy and poor, the delinquent and romantic, and the socalled ordinary -- in transition, at turning points, and always with universal implications. These stories are at once classic and modern, complex and accessible, and, taken together, they bring the good news that a significant, compassionate new voice in American fiction has arrived.
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Political Animal
by David Mizner
A young speechwriter meets the unlikely woman of his dreams during campaign season in Mizner's sharp, very funny novel.
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Heaven Lake
by John Dalton
"Vincent Saunders has graduated from college, left his small hometown in Illinois, and arrived in Taiwan as a Christian volunteer. After opening a ministry house, he meets a wealthy Taiwanese businessman, Mr. Gwa, who tells Vincent that on his far travels to western China he has discovered a beautiful young woman living near the famous landmark Heaven Lake. Elegant, regal, clever, she works a lowly clerk in the local railway station. Gwa wishes to marry her, but is thwarted by the political conflict between China and Taiwan. In exchange for a sum of money, will Vincent travel to China on Gwa's behalf, take part in a counterfeit marriage, and bring her back to Taiwan for Gwa to marry legitimately? Vincent, largely innocent about the ways of the world and believing that marriage is a sacrament, says no. Gwa is furious." "Soon, though, everything Vincent understands about himself and his vocation in Taiwan changes. Supplementing his income from his sparsely attended Bible-study classes, he teaches English to a group of enthusiastic schoolgirls - and it is his tender, complicated friendship with a student that forces Vincent to abandon the ministry house and sends him on a path toward spiritual reckoning. It also causes him to reconsider Gwa's extraordinary proposition."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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Too Beautiful for You
by Rod Liddle
A collection of stories chronicles the lives and fortunes of an array of misfit and miscreant characters whose sexual frustrations and deviant desires draw them to the edge of acceptable behavior.