All Good Men - by Libby Flores (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A bold and devastating debut from recent contributor to The New Yorker Libby Flores; a daring leap into the fraught questions haunting the inner lives of a cast of contemporary men.

"Libby Flores is quite simply one of my favorite writers. Her fictions lift the mirror up to a world that is both recognizable and yet fiercely expands our sense of ourselves and our place here..."

-Paul Yoon, award-winning author of Etna and The Hive and the Honey

In All Good Men, Libby Flores inhabits the male perspective and upends millennia of a dominant gaze, turning it back on itself. In these bold and brilliant stories, the state of "man" is explored like the rooms of a vast but crumbling house, from love and betrayal, parenthood and tragedy, to the cruel competition that often defines them.

Intimate and unsparing, each story brings us into the moments when life-altering choices are made: a group of five childhood friends, now men with their own lives and responsibilities, find themselves at a party dealing with a body; a landscaper follows his dying wife as she embarks on an affair; two college lovers reunite on a beach, one with something to confess; a sound wakes up a husband and father in the middle of the night, calling him to investigate; and what happens when an insurance broker opens a bathroom door at a party and sees his wife's legs wrapped around a stranger.

Libby Flores stays with these men through vulnerability, stupidity, lust, and violence. She interrogates the decisions made within the narrow margins of masculinity--and the consequences that affect everyone in their orbit. The private, the unvarnished--we are invited to see it all. Flores shines a light into the dark, delivering portraits of men at their most unguarded. And in her final story, she offers a provocative, dazzling rebuttal.

Review Quotes

"I love reading Libby Flores' stories-- there are so many beautiful sentences here, a beauty that wraps around spiky yearnings and boiling resentments. It's such a compelling combination. She's unafraid to look at encounters of all kinds-- some frightening, others subtle, all with characters made from insight and complexity." --Aimee Bender

""Libby Flores is a writer with real power. Her prose is lyrical, lithe, and urgent, and her characters are beautifully, impossibly human. Individually, the stories in All Good Men are rare jewels, sharp and dangerous, refracting brilliant light from the most unexpected angles. Together, they are breathtaking, wholly original and transcendent." --Bret Anthony Johnston

"All Good Men is indeed an electric examination of men, good and bad, in all their glory--flawed, hurt, wrecked, beautiful, meek, dangerous, tender. In these stories of heartbreak, betrayal, misunderstanding, and loss, Libby Flores writes like an angel and digs deep to think about how to reveal these men, all of them trying to get it right but swerving into wrong again and again. Meanwhile, love, always love, sits just on the other side of grief, and rage is swallowed by sorrow. A brilliant book, a great read, riveting." --Deb Olin Unferth

About the Author

Libby Flores' writing has appeared in The New Yorker, One Story Magazine, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, McSweeney's, Tin House, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She lives in Brooklyn.