All Good Men

Libby Flores

Across time, men have held the lion’s share of power, shaping culture and controlling narratives, and yet there is no consensus on what it is to be a man. And while we can agree that masculinity has evolved—or at least changed—we struggle to define what a good man is. A protector? A provider? Is modern man lost or lonely? Afraid? What makes a good man?

In her debut collection of short stories, All Good Men, Libby Flores inhabits the male perspective to confront and subvert the still prevailing and perplexing viewpoint. She does not ponder what’s the matter with men, but explores how men are forged, how we might’ve arrived at a cultural crisis point of masculinity, and whether we are equipped to reckon with our own complicity.

In these intimate and unsparing portraits, Flores brings us to the moments when life-altering choices are made. These men deal, or not, with marriage and affairs, children, dying spouses, and the cruel competition within themselves and with other men.

In All Good Men, we encounter the inner lives of men: a group of five childhood friends, now men with their own lives and responsibilities, find themselves at a party dealing with a body; a landscaper follows his dying wife as she embarks on an affair; two college lovers reunite on a beach one with something to confess; a husband and father goes to check on a sound in the night and is confronted by a forgotten memory; after a boy loses his mother he struggles to navigate adolescence and adulthood, a man is faced with a colicky baby, and what happens when a man opens a bathroom door at a party and sees his wife’s legs wrapped around a stranger.

Flores stays with these men through vulnerability, stupidity, and what they’ve lost along the way. Each story interrogates the decisions these characters make within the narrow margins of masculinity—from their point of view. The private, the unvarnished—we are invited to see it all. Flores shines a light into the dark shadows, delivering portraits of men at their most unguarded, and in her final story, offers a provocative rebuttal. 

Libby Flores' writing has appeared in The New Yorker, One Story Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Gagosian Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Guardian, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.  She lives in Brooklyn, but will always be a Texan. Libby is represented by Sarah Bowlin at Aevitas Creative Management. Her book All Good Men is forthcoming from Unnamed Press in 2027.