Behind every cloud, a silver lining, right? You have to take the good days with the bad. But those clichés miss that life is funny, sad, hilarious, mournful, at the same time. We understand that the happiest of days have a tinge of sadness about them. Conversely, real sadness or missing someone possesses a strange beauty. But sometimes we forget that when it comes to our books. We want our novels to be “a comedy,” or “a romance,” a “laugh riot,” or “tear-jerker,” even though Life doesn’t put itself into those separate boxes. Funny, sad, romantic–all have informed my own writing, and all are present in this list of books as well.
With his keen ability to evoke characters in the South and Middle America who find themselves in reduced circumstances, Brad Barkley restores our faith in human beings to endure the ravages of time with decency and humor. Out of intense loyalty, Reed feels reluctant to leave his crippled friend when his girlfriend pressures him to move on. Mourning their baby's death, a couple takes up dancing lessons to recapture their closeness. Two drifters, Bosco and Ray, scheme to murder an old man, steal his diamonds, and pay a doctor to save Bosco's life.
Craig Nova’s beautifully sad novel Trombonewas much overlooked when it was first published. As melancholy as the trombone solos that ne’er-do-well father and arsonist Dean Golancz plays every time one of his many affairs ends, this book is about dangerous criminals, love, familial loyalty, and big moral questions. Mostly it’s a father-son story and love triangle in the guise of a crime novel, with beautiful, lush, gritty use of language throughout.
Craig Nova's classic novel Trombone is a powerful and poignant portrait of the complexities between an arsonist father and his good son. Dean Gollancz is an easygoing man of modest means. He longs for the Big Time, and when his job at the Print Shop doesn't pay the bills, he commits arson for a Chinese gangster in Los Angeles. His son Ray feels deep love and loyalty for his father, but when he wins an Ivy League scholarship, Ray must decide how much of his own life to sacrifice for Dean's respect. The destructive nature of their relationship is brought…
Mickelson’s Ghosts was the final book of famous novelist and equally famous writing teacher John Gardner, published a few months before his death in a motorcycle accident at the too-young age of 49. It tells the story of Peter Mickelson, a once-famous philosopher nearing the end of his career, and finding himself buying a run-down house he can't afford with his ex-wife and the I.R.S. breathing down his neck. Soon the rationalist philosopher finds himself living in a world of bad decisions, sex, hauntings and ghosts, and religious cults—a world where rationalism can’t save him from his own creeping madness and mortality.
Hoping to pull his life back together, a distraught philosophy professor rents an old Pennsylvania farm house and is haunted by ghosts reiterating an old murder
West Virginia’s Jayne Anne Phillips made a noisy arrival on the literary scene with her triumphant collection of short stories, Black Tickets. One of the first of the “dirty realists,” Phillips paints the backroads and forgotten lives of rural West Virginia during a time when that state, and many like it, were on no one’s radar. As one of her characters says, “This ain’t the South…this is the goddam past.” Phillips captures the loneliness and the disconnected lives of young women and men in a way few books have done.
This collection of short stories looks at the undeniable power of myth, these tales of initiation and betrayal focus on a gallery of characters - a rootless young woman confronts her divorced parents and a 14-year-old girl who leaves a series of foster homes for the world of drug addicts.
Cormac McCarthy is mostly famous for his All the Pretty Horses and The Road, the latter a novel that became a big-budget film and landed him on Oprah’s couch. But this earlier book, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, is what many fans consider the “real” McCarthy. It’s a western, but not like any you’ve ever read. Most westerns feature the good guys and the bad guys, the white hats and the black hats. Here, everyone involved is the blackest of black hats. It’s a horror story, an epic, a picaresque. The Judge is one of the great villains ever in literature, and his bloody story is told in lush and challenging language that recalls William Faulkner.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
The times in which we live make J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye more relevant and able to speak to us than ever. Of course, Holden Caulfield is everyone’s favorite young curmudgeon, but if you haven’t read this one since high school, or at all as an adult, it’s time to give it a second look. This book has often been reduced to its sound bites: everyone Holden encounters is a “phony.” But this novel takes a deep dive into loss, seclusion, depression, and innocence. Holden is funny and smart and lost inside his life, feeling cut off from the life and love teeming around him, a life that both draws him in and repels him. No Young Adult book has ever shone a brighter light on the emotions of being a grownup.
I grew up in Green Bay and my dad was the official scorer for the Packers, so I was immersed in pro football history even as a child. During my careers as a newspaper feature writer and editor and as an advertising copywriter, I also became a sports historian. My magnum opus was “The Encyclopedia of North American Sports History,” 650,000 words. But my favorite by far is my biography of Johnny Blood. I was 12 or 13 when I decided I wanted to write it, 33 when I began working on it, 38 when I finished it, and 78 when it was finally published.
From Kirkus Reviews: "This debut short-story collection paints the wistful life of a newspaper journalist as seen through his sexual and romantic encounters...
Throughout, Hickok writes in an assured style, pulling readers along. The narrow sexual focus results in a distorted picture, yet other aspects of Art's life emerge at the edges—his intelligence, his career as a journalist, and even the sincerity with which he gives in to his male urges and construes sex as love...
Subdued yet alluring; a pensive reflection on the male psyche."
Love, Sex, and Other Calamities: 15 Stories and a Poem by Ralph Hickok
A man arrives in a new city, hoping to start a new life, but he’s still haunted by memories of past loves… A 12-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl have a brief romantic encounter when their families are vacationing in neighboring lakeside cottages… Two teenagers enjoy sexual experimentation when she babysits for her little brother while her parents are out drinking… A high school boy has a crush on an older woman who identifies with Molly Bloom… A college freshman falls in love with a high school freshman and is amazed at the depths of her passion… A guy wins…
