Muscle Man - by Jordan Castro (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Harold, a middling literature professor at a liberal arts college, lives in a state of dissatisfaction and fear. His colleagues and students evoke nothing but disgust and disdain. None of them understand strength, power, and spiritual actualization like he does. His university's campus--seemingly picturesque--constantly threatens to reveal something sinister.

Over the course of a single afternoon, he wanders the halls, sits in meetings, steals from a student, and goes to the gym--all while reflecting on his professional and existential situation. With every line of Harold's frenetic consciousness, his mundane routine transforms into something more foreboding, culminating in an ingenious twist.

Brilliantly imagined and darkly funny, Muscle Man is as much a critique of resentment and contemporary masculinity as a satire on the state of higher education, exploring weakness and strength, rationality and irrationality, the spirit and the flesh, and the individual and the collective.

With his minute-to-minute occupation of Harold's existential disquietude, Castro imbues the novel's philosophical inquiries with thrilling suspense. Is Harold a raving lunatic whose disdain stems from his own perilous inadequacies, or is there something truly sinister about his colleagues? When all is said and done, is strength a virtue, or a mirage?

Review Quotes

"The nuanced character arcs satisfy and inject an unexpected dose of optimism. Existential dark humor shot through with heart." --Kirkus Reviews

"Muscle Man is a triumph. It's like reading Walter Benjamin or Thomas Bernhard on creatine powder and gym memes. Jordan Castro is an outrageously gifted novelist who has given us a truly original fable of the contemporary moment. Everything in this novel is feral and brilliant, and dizzyingly funny. Castro is one-of-one, and this book is pure heat." --Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans

"A strong stark novel that the few men who do read, must read. But women are also more than welcome, as is everyone with a heart." --Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus

"Jordan Castro's hilarious and astonishing new novel discovers in the insane condition of higher education surprising symptoms of the human condition." --Michael Clune, author of Pan

"Muscle Man is a brilliant disquisition on violence, resentment, victims, and Nietzschean bodybuilders in American academia, told with the obsessive crankiness of Thomas Bernhard, acute absurdity of Donald Antrim, and a vivid linguistic hilarity all Castro's own. Made me want to feel the pump." --Lexi Freiman, author of The Book of Ayn

About the Author