Charles Bock
(b.1970)Charles Bock is the author of the novel Beautiful Children, which was a New York Times bestseller and notable book of the year, and won the Sue Kaufmann Prize for best first novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Harper's, Esquire, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Slate, AGNI, and the Iowa Review, as well as in numerous anthologies. He's received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri foundation in Umbria Italy, Yaddo, UCross, and the Vermont Studio Center.
Charles Bock recommends
Help Wanted (2024)
Adelle Waldman
"Help Wanted is a marvelous novel. We get to eavesdrop and follow and enjoy the misadventures of the motley cast working the four in the morning shift (unloading trucks at a big box store, a place none of these workers can afford). On one level this is about economics and gentrification; on another level it is about people struggling to keep themselves from drowning; meanwhile there are hijinks so funny you blow your tea out of your nose; there's a perfectly absurd plot straight out of Catch-22. We want everyone to get that lifesaving promotion. The worst thing about this novel is that I finished it and can't ever read it again for the first time. But now it is part of my life. I am thankful to Adelle Waldman for being brave and talented and bighearted enough to have created this gift."
The Brightest Place in the World (2020)
David Philip Mullins
"My life stopped for two days while I read this novel. The Brightest Place in the World accomplishes what only our best art attempts. In these pages, David Philip Mullins tracks the vagaries and desires of people we recognize as they deal with the unthinkable: illicit sex, crazy scams, betrayals, loneliness. This book is a love letter to Las Vegas, the western desert, and, most of all, the mysteries of the human heart."
Ohio (2018)
Stephen Markley
"Ohio is that rarest of unicorns, a novel that swings for the fences, and actually tries to explain just what the fuck happened to this country after the towers fell, and how we got to this awful particular moment. Stephen Markley goes for the universe with every single sentence he writes. That the universe answers him as often as it does makes for a hugely impressive first novel."
More recommendations
Visitors also looked at these authors
