This Kind of Man

<p><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Iconoclastic deftly crafted original memorable and thought-provoking each one of the short stories comprising This Kind of Man is raised by author Sean Murphy to an impressive level of literary excellence.</strong></p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(63 63 63 1)>-Midwest Book Review</strong></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>This Kind of Man</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> a suite of dramatic monologues and meditations seems to pick up where Raymond Carver left off: anatomizing all the ways that American masculinity finds itself adrift with a special thought for the women in the same lifeboat. Murphy sees how we live so plainly and clearly that in the best possible way it hurts.</span><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>-Louis Bayard</strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> author of </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>The Pale Blue Eye</em></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>THIS KIND OF MAN</strong> offers an unvarnished look at life in 21st Century America excavating the complicated tender wild truth of what it is to be a man across generations and relationships. These stories interrogate the pressures and tensions of contemporary life and the ways men grapple with them often without success. Issues such as marriage fatherhood aggression alcoholism gender expectations generational backlash and the inexorable dread of death abound.</p><p class=ql-align-justify> </p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Many of these stories live within a slow implosion of coping and often failing as well as those who refuse to succumb addressing concerns oft-discussed or not discussed enough in mainstream print: gun violence the recent history of coal country Appalachia sports-related concussions illegal immigration (and the jobs many of these ostensibly unwelcome folks are obliged to do) homelessness and the inability of men to honestly connect or communicate.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify> </p><p class=ql-align-justify>Far from excusing or exonerating toxic males this collection locates their violence (toward others against oneself) in the context of a deadening culture and the false narratives that prevail in an exploitative zero-sum game capitalist model where those without are encouraged to quarrel with similarly overworked and underpaid mostly blue-collar workers. We see that our received notions of manhood and masculinity are inculcated-from the beginning and by design-to ensure willing participation in a system where the overwhelming majority are excluded from the start. We witness the way these dysfunctions are handed down like inheritance and how every cliché from fighting to drinking to intolerance of dissent and distrust of others is a carefully constructed trap preventing solidarity empathy and love (for others for one's self).</p>