100 Books Like A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

As the song goes: “It ain’t whacha say, it’s the way how’s ya say it.” And that’s what I love about all five of these books.  It isn’t exactly the place, or the time, or a particular character; it’s the style. 

Joyce’s early stories, though, do cast magic over a certain time and place and make them come alive as if they were written yesterday.

The Dead, probably the best known of them, and made into a touching movie (John Houston’s last), is a great example of the feeling Joyce could evoke in us, the readers, with the carefully chosen words of a poet.

This is a great blow-by-blow primer on how the best investigative journalism is done. As a journalist, I admired the bravery of the author taking on the powerful people who propped up Theranos and its wunderkind founder, Elizabeth Holmes.

It reminds me of why I love the work I do, which is often leads to dead ends because someone doesn’t want you to know the truth. Books like Bad Blood show that it’s important to have investigative journalists who don’t give up the fight and end up saving lives by exposing fraud. 

The Ballad of Black Tom rocked my world.

I was already writing stories inspired by H.P. Lovecraft but I wasn’t sure I had a place in the genre. Then Victor LaValle took one of Lovecraft’s most racist works, The Horror At Red Hook, and produced an alternate version.

Black Tom touches on the events of Lovecraft’s original story but tells the tale from the point of view of a black musician named Tommy Tester. LaValle’s reimagining of Lovecraft is a revelation.

He showed me that I didn’t have to be like Lovecraft to write in his world. And LaValle perfectly captures the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, a world that Lovecraft’s racism prevented him from seeing, even though he lived in New York City at the time.

It’s devastating to reconcile a world that could treat anyone, especially children, the way Pecola Breedlove is treated in The Bluest Eye. The cruelty of racism and oppression, both historical and ongoing, feels unbearable to confront. The idea that worth, beauty, and love could be tied to a single, narrow ideal is profoundly heartbreaking. I want to reach through the pages, take Pecola in my arms, and tell her she is beautiful, that her self-worth is inherent, and free her from the horrors she endures.

Throughout the book, I yearn for someone in her world to lift her up, hold her, and tell her it will be okay. But they, too, are trapped in cycles of pain and suffering. Morrison’s writing is unflinchingly honest and achingly beautiful, taking me to a raw, vulnerable place where pain demands confrontation.

This book captures the depth of human experience, reminding me that… show more.

The once-promising writer Jacob Finch Bonner is out of ideas and down on his luck. When his student Evan Parker proclaims that his work-in-progress is sure to be a runaway hit, Bonner waits to see if this bold proclamation comes to fruition. 

After Bonner learns Parker has died, he decides he’ll usher that story into the world—as his own. But someone knows Bonner isn’t the original author. Shame and suspense intertwine and heighten as this book speeds along. I enjoyed Korelitz’s exploration of how far an author will go for praise or even relevancy. 

This novel also explores an idea that fascinates me: Who “owns” a story? Just because something happened to you or your family, does that mean no one else can tell it or embellish it? Author Anne Lamott says you own everything that happened to you, but how much should you tell, and how will others react… show more.

This book, by Kirk Wallace Johnson tells the story of a bizarre heist that took place at the British Museum of Natural History in 2009.

The thief, Edwin Rist, was a 20-year-old American flute student who broke into the museum to steal hundreds of priceless, exotic bird specimens, many of which were collected by the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in the 19th century.

What first drew me to the book was that I knew Edwin’s dad back when I was in grad school. But what kept me turning the pages was the writing and story. The book explores the world of Victorian-era fly-tying and the obsession that collectors have with rare feathers.

Rist, who was also an avid fly-tier, had planned the heist to obtain feathers for his own collection, which he intended to sell to other collectors. Many of the collectors and fly-tying enthusiasts knew that the feathers probably… show more.

Similar to Cioran, Ligotti has a profoundly dark worldview, but not one that is unearned.

Ligotti’s own experiences with anhedonia and despair seep through his writing. I cannot get enough of it. Through his prose, he creates his own world wherein doom is assured and life seems like a poorly written, performed, and directed play that is in profoundly bad taste.

It may seem like work like this would depress you, but for me, it gives me a sense of understanding. Someone out there, even if it’s just Ligotti’s characters, has felt that gloom.

I love this book because it forced me to take sharp notice of Hemingway.

No, it wasn’t the big novels, the ones that had become best-sellers; they were everywhere. But when this book fell into my lap, it made me want to dig right into him. It’s his earliest collection of stories, and though Hemingway said once that they were interconnected, critics then and now disagree.

I think they’re great because they show the early manifestations of what he coined “the iceberg theory” of good writing—writing that forced me, one day, standing in a bookstore, reading the last few pages of A Farewell to Arms, twenty years or so after reading the book for the first time, to fairly nearly weep.

Of all the elements of this story, I feel the love triangle between Eustacia, Wildeve, and Clym is of secondary interest to the environment in which it takes place, which is the weird and lugubrious heathlands.

Perhaps I am unfamiliar with heaths; as far as I know, we don’t have any in the U.S. Hardy describes the British heathlands like the landscape of another planet. Largely flat with shallow hills and vales, it sometimes bursts with floral color, and depending on the weather, it can be beset with raking orange sunlight or gloomy palls of mist.

The locals are fond of lighting evening bonfires, and Hardy’s descriptions of the firelight dancing on their faces are mesmerizing and compellingly suggests an unbroken cultural link with Britain’s pagan past.    

I am intrigued by these stories and have read a number of them a number of times.

There is universal acclaim for Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, and these stories display those same qualities that created Gatsby.

One of my favorites is “The Rich Boy,” and one that I would recommend to every reader. Such clarity of mind, soul, and taste expressed in this story in particular makes great, gripping writing. I am even impressed by the stories written expressly for the magazines (every story can’t be a masterpiece).