Art of Manliness - Nine Writers Carrying the Torch for Men’s Fiction

The days of Herman Melville, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and Raymond Carver - among many others - are long gone. These days, there is no such thing as men's fiction in the same way as we have Chick Lit.

The Art of Manliness recently featured a guest post from Jarrett Haley and Tim Chilcote that offers nice current men's fiction writers (but they forgot a couple: Chuck Palahniuk and Michael Chabon are very different, but both are great writers).

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a masterpiece of father/son relationships.

Nine Writers Carrying the Torch for Men’s Fiction

by Guest on December 16, 2010

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Jarrett Haley and Tim Chilcote.

Gentlemen, let’s face it: Hemingway is dead. Likewise with Faulkner, Mailer, Updike, Cheever, Miller, Carver, and the rest of the greats who made a living writing the stories of men in the golden age. But just because the big men of letters have fallen doesn’t mean that letters for men have gone down with them. There’s plenty of manly literature outside the icons, and plenty of writers still making books for the male mind. Here’s a sampling of living, breathing authors to look out for the next time you’re in need of a manly read:

Cormac McCarthy

We’ll start with the obvious choice, because chances are if you haven’t read his books you’ve at least seen one adapted for the screen, from All the Pretty Horses to the blockbusters No Country for Old Men and The Road. Good movies, sure, but nothing compares to the man’s way with words. Most of his early books are set in backwoods Tennessee, but that was before he was branded master of the dark, gruesome West. Brutality peaks with Blood Meridian, and as for The Road, don’t let Oprah’s Book Club endorsement scare you off — never has a book more savagely examined the dedication of a father for his son.

Wells Tower

Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a collection of nine short stories, is a world inhabited by down-on-their-luck narrators, men trying in vain to forge a new path through contemporary life. Tower often likes to end his stories with an explosive catastrophe, one that leaves the reader probing for meaning inside, say, a rotting moose carcass or a shattered aquarium. Ever gone through a rough patch in life? Ever battled to reinvent yourself? Read this book.

Read the whole post.

Tags: Jarrett Haley, Tim Chilcote, Nine Writers Carrying the Torch for Men’s Fiction, the Art of Manliness, Chuck Palahniuk, Michael Chabon, Harry Crews, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Philipp Meyer, Adam Schuitema, Padgett Powell, men, literature, fiction, masculinity