Such a Good Man

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. 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.

Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collections One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and No Good for Digging, as well as the fiction chapbook Secrets of the Wild. He spent ten years painting houses in Michigan and now lives in South Carolina and teaches creative writing at Winthrop University.