Here are 100 books that Affliction fans have personally recommended if you like
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Michael Kimmel is one of the world’s leading experts on men and masculinities. He was the SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University. Among his many books are Manhood in America, Angry White Men, The Politics of Manhood, The Gendered Society, and the best seller Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. With funding from the MacArthur Foundation, he founded the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook in 2013.
Lee depicts the world of San Francisco through the eyes of a young Chinese-American boy, navigating the grownup world of race, class, and urban life, and trying to find the place where he fits, in between his family and ethnicity, and his modern American sensibility. Also worth noting, Kai-Ting’s encounters with African-Americans, Chicanos and other Chinese people, in a novel that has nary a white person in it.
"What a knockout. An incredibly rich and new voice for American literature...China Boy grabs the reader's heart and won't let go."-Amy Tan, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club
"A fascinating, evocative portrait of the Chinese community in California in the 1950s, caught between two complex, demanding cultures."-The New York Times Book Review
Kai Ting is the only American-born son of a Shanghai family that fled China during Mao's revolution. Growing up in a San Francisco multicultural, low-income neighborhood, Kai is caught between two worlds-embracing neither the Chinese nor the American way of life. After his mother's death, Kai is…
Michael Kimmel is one of the world’s leading experts on men and masculinities. He was the SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University. Among his many books are Manhood in America, Angry White Men, The Politics of Manhood, The Gendered Society, and the best seller Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. With funding from the MacArthur Foundation, he founded the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook in 2013.
The novel has a remarkable twist on the traditional coming of age story; it’s also a novel about a straight guy coming to terms with his own homophobia. It’s not a novel about a gay boy, but more a novel about a sraight boy’s understanding of how deeply homophobia has infected his life.
The new novel from an acclaimed short story writer - a brilliantly observed portrait of a man teetering on the edge of abandoning his marriage for a homosexual affair
As a husband, Luca Carcera hides his emotions behind the safety of routine domesticity. With his spice jars and cookbooks stacked perfectly in the kitchen, he feels in some measure of control. He loves his wife, but is struggling to come to terms with the secret desires which lie beneath his role as a steady, suburban, middle-class husband. His parents, Lou and Dorothy, spent 14 years together before Lou abandoned his…
Michael Kimmel is one of the world’s leading experts on men and masculinities. He was the SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University. Among his many books are Manhood in America, Angry White Men, The Politics of Manhood, The Gendered Society, and the best seller Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. With funding from the MacArthur Foundation, he founded the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook in 2013.
This play has so many layers: men’s relationship to work, marriage, fatherhood, unrealized ambitions, and the costs of buying your own bullshit. See it with Dustin Hoffman or Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman's deferred American dream
Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity-and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish,…
During a lonely stretch of primary school, I recall discussing my predicament with my mother. “You only need one friend,” she said by way of encouragement. Some part of me agreed. I’ve been fortunate to have had (and to have) several friends in my life, never more than a few at a time, more men than women, and each has prompted me to be and become more vital and spacious than I was prior to knowing them. The books I’m recommending—and the one I wrote—feature these types of catalyzing, life-changing relationships. Each involves some kind of adventure. Each evokes male friendship that is gravitational, not merely influential, but life-defining.
It centers on and celebrates becoming—molting from one skin to another. For Ishmael this is a transition from a tired and limiting worldview to something fresh and alive.
The “bosom buddies” at the heart of the novel, Ishmael and Queequeg, seem comprised of opposites, but Ishmael’s etherealizing is grounded by Queequeg’s pragmatic ingenuity in ways that quiet and expand the young pagan-Presbyterian’s buzzing, anxious mind. Theirs is a friendship of succor, probably sex, and survival—all of it shadowed by the delusional obsessions of their mad captain.
Melville's tale of the whaling industry, and one captain's obsession with revenge against the Great White Whale that took his leg. Classics Illustrated tells this wonderful tale in colourful comic strip form, offering an excellent introduction for younger readers. This edition also includes a biography of Herman Melville and study questions, which can be used both in the classroom or at home to further engage the reader in the work at hand.
I spent many years deeply angry at my parents and not really understanding why. When I found out about shame, and how it was passed down from generation to generation, I was finally able to crack the code. Their “permissiveness” was actually neglect. Without meaning to, they had put their shame on me and I was still suffering from not really being seen. I made it my mission to help others heal their shame so they can be better people and better parents, and live fuller lives. I am the co-director of the Center for Healing Shame and co-author of Embracing Shame.
Shame is the major factor in all depression, and when I substituted “shame” every time Real used the word “depression,” I realized I had found the definitive work on how shame operates on men. I have all my male clients read it, and it has changed many lives.
The book reads in many ways like a novel. Real frames the book with stories about his father: It starts with descriptions of how depressed his father was and how difficult it was to connect with him in his depression and isolation. And it ends with Real finally getting his father (and himself) to acknowledge the love between them.
A bestseller for over 20 years, I Don’t Want to Talk About It is a groundbreaking and hopeful guide to understanding and destigmatizing male depression, essential not only for men who may be suffering but for the people who love them.
Twenty years of experience treating men and their families has convinced psychotherapist Terrence Real that depression is a silent epidemic in men—that men hide their condition from family, friends, and themselves to avoid the stigma of depression’s “un-manliness.” Problems that we think of as typically male—difficulty with intimacy, workaholism, alcoholism, abusive behavior, and rage—are really attempts to escape depression.…
Having brought myself back from the brink more than once, finally building a lasting, abundant life for myself; I know what it takes and I know how easy it is to lose your way. I am extremely passionate about helping others avoid the pitfalls, break through the self-imposed barriers and find their own version of abundance. It’s not just about money, though that’s certainly a component for a lot of people. It’s about bringing awareness to what your dream life actually looks like, getting precise about it, and then clearing you a path that leads inexorably towards it. I have walked that path myself and now, I want to help you do the same.
What I love about The Way of the Superior Man is that it frames the traditional, ancient ways of looking at masculine energy in a way that those of us in the modern, 21st-century western world can relate to.
This is not a book about being a man, or in any way exclusively for men. It’s about how we relate to the masculine energy that is inside of all of us. This is an important component of what I teach in Stepping Beyond Intention as well because it shows us how we relate to others and the world around us.
It’s about getting you to see the interplay and polarity of energies that exist within you. Armed with that awareness, you’ll be able to better direct yourself at achieving your goals.
Though much has changed in society since the first publication of The Way of the Superior Man, men of all ages still "tussle with the challenges of women, work, and sexual desire." Including an all-new preface by author David Deida, this 20th-anniversary edition of the classic guide to male spirituality offers the next generation the opportunity to cultivate trust in the moment and put forth the best versions of themselves in an ever-changing world.
In The Way of the Superior Man, Deida explores the most important issues in men's lives-from career and family to women and intimacy to love and…
Some creative writers believe that stories carry a responsibility. The duty to entertain, of course, but also to educate, challenge and question the character(s) of the most powerful, the wealthiest. I am one of them. As an author, screenwriter, stage, and film actor, I’ve always believed in using stories as a platform to convey positively disruptive ideas, to highlight potentially destructive ideologies, to combat imperialism, expansionism, racism, and other toxic practices while delivering a neutral message devoid of political affiliations and emotional responses with no logical ground. Not unlike my latest novel, America is a Zoo, I am the product of a passionate soul, one who’s apolitical by design, yet political by conviction.
Satires are mostly identified with laughter and larger-than-life figures moving in equally absurd settings with this… theatrical tone used to amplify, highlight very real issues. But satirical novels also demand change. Chuck Palahniuk’s novel,Adjustment Day, is both fun and challenging, and expertly executed.
What is it about? A mysterious blue-black book carries directives leading to an “Adjustment Day.” It is shared among private circles, triggering a countdown to an earth-shattering schism.
Brilliant, layered, and complex, a must-read: a nightmarish vision of our twisted and fractured societal body.
Adjustment Day is an ingenious darkly comic work in which Chuck Palahniuk does what he does best: skewer the absurdities in our society. Geriatric politicians bring the nation to the brink of a third world war to control the burgeoning population of young males, while working-class men dream of burying the elites. Adjustment Day's arrival makes real the logical conclusion of every separatist fantasy, alternative fact, and conspiracy theory lurking in the American psyche.
I am a social and legal historian of late 19th and early 20th Century Latin America, and the majority of my work is about the emergence of the middle class. I first got interested in researching dueling because I had the idea that the duel probably played a role in creating and enforcing a social dividing line between the upper elite and the middle class. But once I got immersed in the historical documents I realized how wrong my initial hypothesis had been, how little dueling had to do with social class, and how much it was about maintaining—or sometimes gaming for advantage—the norms of decorum in politics and the press.
A recognized classic, and one of the first books to bring gender theory, masculinity studies, and the new cultural history to the academic study of dueling. Nye looks at French dueling in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a manifestation of evolving ideals and norms of masculine honor, at a time when France was becoming less aristocratic and more bourgeois. This is the book that first convinced me that dueling could be a legitimate topic for serious historical research, and not just some quirky random sideshow.
After a decade of works on women's history, historians are becoming aware of the dearth of literature on men's history. Professor Nye addresses this gap in a study of evolving definitions of masculinity in France since the eighteenth century. He examines specifically the aristocratic ethos of male honour, rooted in a society of landlords, hunters, and warriors, adapted to a society motivated by utilitarian values, urban life, and rational law. He focuses on the cultural practices and mentality of middle and upper class men and the appeal of their codes to men throughout French society.
I started my career as a historian of gender and sexuality, but in what I sometimes describe as a mid-career crisis I became a historian of the US Army. I love doing research in archives, piecing together the scraps of stories and conversations into a broader whole, figuring out how people made sense of the world they lived in. The books I write make arguments that I hope will be useful to other historians and to military leaders, but I also want people to enjoy reading them.
This book insists that we need to think about the ways that what we read or view may shape the way we see the world.
Greg Daddis has waded through mountains of “macho pulps”—the massively-popular war-focused men’s adventure magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, with titles like True Men, Male, Valor, and Battle Cry—to show us how they portrayed men and war.
He asks how these stories of outsized heroism (often accompanied by sexual conquest) may have shaped the expectations of the young men sent to fight in Vietnam.
Pulp Vietnam is a masterful balancing act, never insisting that A → B, but refusing to treat popular culture as nothing more than a story. And the color photo insert is worth the price all by itself!
In this compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam explores how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam. The 'macho pulps' - boasting titles like Man's Conquest, Battle Cry, and Adventure Life - portrayed men courageously defeating their enemies in battle, while women were reduced to sexual objects, either trivialized as erotic trophies or depicted as sexualized villains using their bodies to prey on unsuspecting, innocent men. The result was the crafting and dissemination of a particular version of…
I am a Christian author who loves to see when relationships, rooted in Christ, succeed. I have been married for 13 years and during that time we have had ups and downs and have found that our relationship would have never succeeded if it wasn’t for Christ and being grounded in his truths. I have sought out ways to cultivate healthy a marriage and often find myself studying and reading on how to best have our relationship reflect Christ and his love for the church.
Even though this book was written for men, a group of ladies and I read through this book together. It gave us all so much insight into why our husbands make the choices they make or do what they do.
Many times, I would be reading and would stop to ask my husband “Is this true?” He always answered ‘Yes!’ It sparked many good conversations between us and helped me to understand and appreciate him so much more.
God designed men to seek out adventure. But, somewhere between childhood and the struggles of yesterday, most men lose sight of those dreams. Fear not: bestselling author and counselor John Eldredge is here to teach men that there's a better way to live.
In this updated and expanded edition of the timeless bestseller Wild at Heart, Eldredge unpacks man's search for validation, the need for the development of courage in his soul, and the call to live a life of adventure.
Using discoveries from his own life and backing them with scripture, Eldredge reminds men that although their childhood passions,…
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