Kirjahaku

In these inventive and formally daring stories, Dustin M. Hoffman shines a light into the dark corners of American suburbia. The housepainters, contractors, formerly incarcerated carnival workers, and fathers that populate these pages are doing their best to overcome life’s brutal indifference. Characters sometimes face unusual situations: one plays infinite games of Monopoly with God, while the Man in the Yellow Hat must decide how to react when a window washer is hospitalized with serious injuries. Mostly, though, they navigate the challenges of grief, poverty, and arguments with siblings that many of us will find all too familiar. With brilliance and perception, Hoffman interrogates the intersections of labor and masculinity, peeling back the spackled facades of class, family, and domesticity. Such a Good Man depicts darkness, cruelty, and absurdity without flinching—and reveals the eternal human desire for intimacy, especially when it remains just out of reach.

Rare voices in fiction, the lives of the working class consume this collection. Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist brings to life the narratives of midwestern blue-collar workers. In these sixteen stories, author Dustin M. Hoffman invites readers to peek behind the curtain of the invisible-but-ever-present “working stiff” as he reveals their lives in full complexity, offering their gruff voices-so often ignored-without censorship. The characters at the heart of these stories work with their hands. They strive to escape invisibility. They hunt the ghost of recognition. They are painters, drywall finishers, carpenters, roofers, oil refinery inspectors, and hardscapers, all aching to survive the workday. They are air force firemen, snake salesmen, can pickers, ice-cream truck drivers, and Jamaican tour guides, seething forth from behind the scenes. They are the underemployed laborers, the homeless, the retired, the fired, the children born to break their backs. One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist initiates readers into the secret nightmares and surprising beauty and complexity of a sweat-stained, blue-collar world.