June 20, 2020
As we approach Father’s Day this weekend, we have assembled a group of books that feature fathers—good and bad, present and absent, stepparent and guardian—in fiction, memoir, and graphic novel. Some are favorites from earlier days, from Russia to Sweden to Lebanon to India to all across America; some are newly published, all celebrating the importance and essential influence that fathers have on their children.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, Center for Fiction Bookstore
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The Vanishing Half
By Brit Bennett
Published by Riverhead Books
After her astonishing debut, The Mothers, Bennett returns with a searing family story about identical twin sisters in the last half of the 20th century who end up living with different racial identities, making choices that will reverberate through generations.
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The Lightness
By Emily Temple
Published by William Morrow & Company
A young girl’s father goes missing from a Buddhist retreat. In her search for his whereabouts, she journeys to his last known location, the mountaintop Levitation Center where the plot thickens when she meets some adventurous girls at the ‘Boot Camp for Bad Girls.’ A sophisticated debut from a very promising Brooklyn writer!
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Fall Back Down When I Die
By Joe Wilkins
Published by Back Bay Books
A traumatized boy comes under the care of a recently orphaned ranch hand and an unlikely family is formed, creating a fierce love that must overcome the violence that haunts this rural Montana community. Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
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The Storyteller
By Pierre Jarawan
Published by World Editions
A young son, driven by the memory of bedtime stories, travels from Germany to war-torn Beirut in search of his missing father in a novel rich in political history and informed by Jarawan’s own personal experience.
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
By James Baldwin
Published by Everyman's Library
Our preferred edition, with Edwidge Danticat’s introduction, this 1953 classic follows the journey of a young Black boy, the stepson of a Pentecostal minister, coming of age and coming to terms with his sexuality in Harlem.
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The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
By Hannah Tinti
Published by Dial Press
A completely gripping novel of a father and daughter on the road, this is a beautiful piece of literary fiction that is both a mystery and a powerful family story about the love a father has for his daughter.
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The Road
By Cormac McCarthy
Published by Vintage
On the flip side, a dystopian fiction of father and son on the road through an America burnt and desolate toward an uncertain future, held together only by their love for one another.
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The Namesake
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Published by Mariner Books
Pulitzer winner Lahiri illuminates the immigrant experience of a Calcutta family in America, and the conflicts inherent in living between two cultures and family traditions—with a nod to Gogol.
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The Helios Disaster
By Linda Boström Knausgård
Published by World Editions
“I am born of a father. I split his head.” So begins this powerful Swedish novella which takes the myth of Athena as a stepping off place for a story of madness—by the wife of Karl Ove, and a prize-winning literary star in her own right.
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Sing, Unburied, Sing
By Jesmyn Ward
Published by Scribner Books
A National Book Award winner among other prizes, this tale of the good, kind grandfather who raises Jojo and the unsteady father just out of prison follows the family on a harrowing road trip, a Southern Gothic that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
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Moonglow
By Michael Chabon
Published by Harper Perennial
Based on Chabon’s Jewish grandfather’s personal history, this evocative novel takes the shape of a deathbed confession, passing down essential stories about life during the course of one week—from Philadelphia to Germany to Florida, from war through marriage.
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Pops
By Michael Chabon
Published by Harper Perennial
This time Chabon turns to nonfiction in these heartfelt essays, always insightful and full of compassion, about being a father. The brilliant set piece, from GQ, being the trip he took to Paris for Fashion Week with his son.
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The New One
By Mike Birbiglia
Published by Grand Central Publishing
After his successful one-man show and film adaptation (watch it even if you are not contemplating having children) here’s a print version of the comic’s hilarious entry into parenthood—with some new stories and wife Jen’s poetry.
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Reading My Father
By Alexandra Styron
Published by Scribner Books
The roller coaster ride of growing up with a famous father is beautifully rendered as Styron comes to terms with her childhood in a house filled with glittering writers and politicians, and the hard facts of living with a depressive who she dearly loved.
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Fun Home
By Alison Bechdel
Published by Mariner Books
One of the finest examples of graphic novels of our age—Alison describes her childhood coming of age and finding her sexual identity with great tenderness and a lot of humor, in the hothouse of a small family home where her father is a funeral director and closeted gay man.
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Inheritance
By Dani Shapiro
Published by Anchor Books
Talk about family secrets: Shapiro discovered after a DNA test that her father was not actually her biological father. She writes about her journey to connect with the man she never knew with grace, making this fascinating memoir a page-turner.
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Between the World and Me
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Published by One World
An instant classic, this award-winning book is a gift from father to son in the form of a letter recounting his own experiences in the world, confronting issues of race throughout American history with an intimacy that sealed Coates’s place in the literary canon as a writer to stand up and listen to.