Explorations in Masculinity Now – Nonfiction

Men wield outsized power across all major institutions. But they are falling behind across all measures of well-being and success. In American Men, Jordan Ritter Conn portrays the lives of an amateur MMA fighter, a law student, a West Point graduate and former baseball star, and a young man still living at home, exploring modern American masculinity. Nick Paumgarten’s memoir The Intangibles: Friendship, Fatherhood, and the Love of the Game is not a book about hockey, but one in which a lifetime of obsessively hanging around the game as a player, parent, son, coach, fan, and middle-aged white guy offers a window into an alternate realm of aspirational vigor and extended boyishness – and it is also a sharp and witty exploration of masculinity, both the toxic and nontoxic kinds. In Say Nephew: On Boyhood, Unclehood, and Queer Mentorship, Steven Pfau blends memoir and criticism to celebrate the gay uncles who shape our sense of queer identity, culture, and history. The most influential figure in Pfau’s gay boyhood was his uncle Bruce, who lived through many of the defining events of the gay liberation era. Say Nephew is a coming-of-age story and a wide-ranging study of queer…