Great Literary Fiction for Guys 4
Discover top literary fiction books for men with our curated list of must-read novels. Perfect for guys seeking thought-provoking, impactful stories.
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Club Rules
by Andrew Trees
In Eden's Glen, an iconic world of privilege and ease, the comfortable rituals of wealth and leisure have created an enclave almost untouched by time. But position is not easy to attain, or to keep. And quiet desperation has suddenly found its way into lives whose paths were always smooth before. One family has indisputably stood atop Eden's Glen for generations: the Winthrops. They run the bank, invitations to their parties are the most coveted in town, their favor dictates who gets into the country club-and who does not. But even the Winthrops are not immune to the pressures that underlie the clean, calm surface of life in Eden's Glen. Chafing from the quiet disappointments of twenty years of marriage leaves Preston & Anne Winthrop-the town's golden couple-unprepared to deal with a long-buried secret that bubbles up to shatter an otherwise uneventful summer of tee times and ladies' lunches. As husband and wife struggle to come to terms with their changed lives, their teenage son's misery goes unsoothed. And the events that follow reveal that even money and position cannot save their charmed world. An elegant and moving novel about marriage and the price of a bourgeois American life, Club Rules is powerful, biting and unforgettable.
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Hot Springs
by Geoffrey Becker
Determined to reclaim the child she gave up for adoption five years ago, Bernice sets out with her boyfriend Landis to kidnap the child from the conservative Christian adoptive parents despite Bernice's fears she will be a bad mother.
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Personal Days
by Ed Park
In an unnamed New York-based company, the employees are getting restless as everything around them unravels. There’s Pru, the former grad student turned spreadsheet drone; Laars, the hysteric whose work anxiety stalks him in his tooth-grinding dreams; and Jack II, who distributes unwanted backrubs–aka “jackrubs”–to his co-workers. On a Sunday, one of them is called at home. And the Firings begin. Rich with Orwellian doublespeak, filled with sabotage and romance, this astonishing literary debut is at once a comic delight and a narrative tour de force. It’s a novel for anyone who has ever worked in an office and wondered: “Where does the time go? Where does the life go? And whose banana is in the fridge?” Praise for PERSONAL DAYS "Witty and appealing...Anyone who has ever groaned to hear 'impact' used as a verb will cheer as Park skewers the avatars of corporate speak, hellbent on debasing the language....Park has written what one of his characters calls 'a layoff narrative' for our times. As the economy continues its free fall, Park's book may serve as a handy guide for navigating unemployment and uncertainty. Does anyone who isn't a journalist think there can't be two books on the same subject at the same time? We need as many as we can get right now." —The New York Times Book Review "Never have the minutiae of office life been so lovingly cataloged and collated." —"Three First Novels that Just Might Last," —Time A "comic and creepy début...Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request "Does anyone want anything from the outside world?" —The New Yorker "The modern corporate office is to Ed Park's debut novel Personal Days what World War II was to Joseph Heller's Catch-22—a theater of absurdity and injustice so profound as to defy all reason....Park may be in line to fill the shoes left by Kurt Vonnegut and other satirists par excellence."—Samantha Dunn, Los Angeles Times "In Personal Days Ed Park has crafted a sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always adroit novel about office life...Sharp and lovely language." —Newsweek "A warm and winning fiction debut." — Publishers Weekly "I laughed until they put me in a mental hospital. But Personal Days is so much more than satire. Underneath Park's masterly portrait of wasted workaday lives is a pulsating heart, and an odd, buoyant hope." — Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan "The funniest book I've read about the way we work now." –William Poundstone, author of Fortune's Formula "Ed Park joins Andy Warhol and Don DeLillo as a master of the deadpan vernacular." —Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai
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The Ex-Boyfriend's Handbook
by Matt Dunn
"It's not me - it's you. You've let yourself go, so I'm letting you go too." When Edward Middleton hears those words from Jane, his girlfriend of the past ten years, he knows he's in serious trouble. Determined to get her back, Edward must learn how to make women fancy him again. But what makes for a good boyfriend nowadays? Right now, he's the kind of man who puts the 'ex' into 'sexy'. One thing is certain: if he's to be Jane's Mr Right, he needs to turn himself into a bit of all right. From Atkins and Botox, Edward begins working his way through the makeover alphabet. But can cuddly Teddy really become sexy Eddie? Can he rise from the ranks of discarded exes? Or has his journey of self-discovery taken him in a different direction entirely?
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After the Workshop
by John Mcnally
Life is hard for a literary wunderkind after a decade of writer’s block in this “ribald deconstruction . . . of an industry in love with its own absurdities” (Kirkus Reviews). You graduate from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with a short story published in The New Yorker and subsequently Best American Short Stories. You stay in town and work on your novel. And work on your novel. Until, finally, twelve years have passed . . . and you are working as a media escort for author tours and your unfinished novel sits in a box under your bed. Now your girlfriend has left you. Your car is missing a muffler. Your neighbor is walking around naked because his hands are bandaged and he can’t unzip his pants. You are at the whims of a slew of increasingly unhinged writers, and when one of them disappears, an insane New York publicist begins stalking you. This is the life of Jack Hercules Sheahan, a character well understood by author John McNally. McNally is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as well as a former media escort, and these misadventures are brought to life by his very own. Recalling the wry humor of novels by Nick Hornby and Michael Chabon, After the Workshop tells the satirical story of a writer who confronts the demons from his past while escorting those of his present.
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Day for Night
by Frederick Reiken
"If you look hard enough into the history of anything, you will discover things that seem to be connected but are not." So claims a character in Frederick Reiken's wonderful, surprising novel, which seems in fact to be determined to prove just the opposite. How else to explain the threads that link a middle-aged woman on vacation in Florida with a rock and roll singer visiting her comatose brother in Utah, where he's been transported after a motorcycle injury in Israel, where he works with a man whose long-lost mother, in a retirement community in New Jersey, recognizes him in a televised report about an Israeli-Palestinian skirmish? And that's not the half of it. In DAY FOR NIGHT, critically acclaimed writer Frederick Reiken spins an unlikely and yet utterly convincing story about people lost and found. They are all refugees from their own lives or history's cruelties, and yet they wind up linked to each other in compelling and unpredictable ways that will keep you guessing until the very end.
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This is Just Exactly Like You
by Drew Perry
When his wife leaves him for his best friend after an impulsive real estate purchase, Jack Lang puts on a brave face that nobody believes, a situation that is complicated by his autistic son's sudden manifestation of Spanish-language fluency.
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Season of Gene
by Dallas Hudgens
Somewhere between incarceration and sainthood stands Joe Rice, a man who relishes peace, painkillers, and his Friday-night baseball league. When his shady business partner Gene dies rounding the bases, Joe knows this isn't going to be an ordinary season. Soon enough, a suburban ex-mobster, his entrepreneurial son, and a gun-toting minister have Tasered, maced and harassed Joe over the location of a three-million-dollar Babe Ruth baseball bat he doesn't know anything about. Joe just wants to save his car-detailing/ticker brokerage business from Gene's mountain of debt, crime and craziness. (Winning a game of Madden NFGL against his ex-girlfriend's twelve-year-old son would also be a relief.) But first, he must confront the ghosts of his past - namely, his murdered uncle and his mentally unstable mother. He must also deal with the present, navigating the space between the two women he cares about. And finally, he must face the future, every man's least favorite obstacle. Dallas Hudgens, the acclaimed author of Drive Like Hell, blends Guatemalan chicken, online pharmaceuticals, and unforgettable characters in a raucous but moving story of love and baseball. Season of Gene is a wild ride of a novel about a troubled man, the troubled women who love him and a legendary baseball bat that could either save their lives or get them killed.
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Matrimony
by Joshua Henkin
It's the fall of 1986, and Julian Wainwright, an aspiring writer, arrives at Graymont College in New England. Here he meets Carter Heinz, with whom he develops a strong but ambivalent friendship, and beautiful Mia Mendelsohn, with whom he falls in love. Spurred on by a family tragedy, Julian and Mia's love affair will carry them to graduation and beyond, taking them through several college towns, over the next fifteen years. Starting at the height of the Reagan era and ending in the new millennium, Matrimony is a stunning novel of love and friendship, money and ambition, desire and tensions of faith. It is a richly detailed portrait of what it means to share a life with someone-to do it when you're young, and to try to do it afresh on the brink of middle age.
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The Heights
by Peter Hedges
The loving marriage of Tim and Kate is unexpectedly challenged by their efforts to retain normalcy, the unsolicited attentions of a society newcomer and an unsettling secret. By the Academy Award-nominated author of What's Eating Gilbert Grape.
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One Mississippi
by Mark Childress
"There is nothing small about Childress's fine novel. It's big in all the ways that matter - big in daring, big in insight, and big-hearted. Really, really big-hearted." -New Orleans Times-Picayune This exuberantly acclaimed novel by the author of the bestselling Crazy in Alabama tells an uproarious and moving story about family, best friends, first love, and surviving the scariest years of your life. You need only one best friend, Daniel Musgrove figures, to make it through high school alive. After his family moves to Mississippi just before his junior year, Daniel finds fellow outsider Tim Cousins. The two become inseparable, sharing a fascination with ridicule, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, and Arnita Beecham, the most bewitching girl at Minor High. But soon things go terribly wrong. The friends commit a small crime that grows larger and larger, and threatens to engulf the whole town. Arnita, the first black prom queen in the history of the school, is injured and wakes up a different person. And Daniel, Tim, and their families are swept up in a shocking chain of events. "Wise, riveting, hilarious, painful, gentle, and ferocious, One Mississippi is a wonderful read." -Anne Lamott "A Tilt-a-Whirl that flings the reader from comedy to calamity. . . . Childress is a fabulist in the manner of John Irving." -Atlanta Journal-Constitution "By turns rollicking and troubling, as provocative as it is droll, One Mississippi is about as easy to resist as a riptide. This critic's advice is to go with its powerful flow." -Raleigh News & Observer
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Exley
by Brock Clarke
Therapist Dr. Pahnee, hired by young Miller Le Ray's mother, finds his own reality unraveling as he tries to deal with a patient dedicated to telling the truth who is unable to distinguish between fact and fiction, while grappling with his own growing attraction to the boy's mother.
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Union Atlantic
by Adam Haslett
A property rights battle between young banker Doug Fanning and retired teacher Charlotte Graves is marked by Charlotte's bank-president brother, Charlotte's tenacious grip on sanity and a troubled high school senior. By the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-finalist author of You Are Not a Stranger Here.
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Driving on the Rim
by Thomas McGuane
Struggling to find meaning in a sordid and humiliating youth from which he emerged a doctor through the help of a surrogate father figure, Berl Pickett is charged with negligent homicide in the death of a former lover before finding strength in the human connections he made throughout the years. By the author of Gallatin Canyon. 50,000 first printing.
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The Cradle
by Patrick Somerville
From a writer and producer of HBO's hit apocalyptic drama series The Leftovers, comes a remarkable tale of devotion, marriage, and parenthood. Early one summer morning, Matthew Bishop kisses his still-sleeping wife Marissa, gets dressed and eases his truck through Milwaukee, bound for the highway. His wife, pregnant with their first child, has asked him to find the antique cradle taken years before by her mother Caroline when she abandoned Marissa, never to contact her daughter again. Soon to be a mother herself, Marissa now dreams of nothing else but bringing her baby home to the cradle she herself slept in. His wife does not know-does not want to know-where her mother lives, but Matt has an address for Caroline's sister near by and with any luck, he will be home in time for dinner. Only as Matt tries to track down his wife's mother, he discovers that Caroline, upon leaving Marissa, has led a life increasingly plagued by impulse and irrationality, a mysterious life that grows more inexplicable with each new lead Matt gains, and door he enters. As hours turn into days and Caroline's trail takes Matt from Wisconsin to Minnesota, Illinois, and beyond in search of the cradle, Matt makes a discovery that will forever change Marissa's life, and faces a decision that will challenge everything he has ever known. Elegant and astonishing, Patrick Somerville tells the story of one man's journey into the heart of marriage, parenthood, and what it means to be a family. Confirming the arrival of an exuberantly talented new writer, THE CRADLE is an uniquely imaginative debut novel that radiates with wisdom and wonder.