Lopez has the ability to give the reader whiplash with his unconventional and bewitching stories.
Good People
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” claims Samuel Beckett. To this, we add: nothing is funnier than unhappiness with a heavy dose of amorality, as we learn from Robert Lopez’s unforgettable Good People. In these twenty stories, a motley cast of obsessive, self-deluded outsiders narrate their darker moments, which include kidnapping, voyeurism, and psychic masochism. As their struggles give way to the black humor of life’s unreason, the bleak merges with the oddly poetic, in a style as lean and resolute as Carver or Hemingway.
Treading the fine line between confession and self-justification, the absurd violence of threatened masculinity, and the perverse joy of neurosis, Lopez’s stories reveal the compulsive suffering at the precarious core of our universal humanity.
BOMB magazine Books Preview selection
Bookish Fiction Preview selection
Vol. 1 Brooklyn Preview selection
Big Other “Most Anticipated Small Press Book” selection
Publishers Weekly “Big Indie Book” selection
Library Journal “BookExpo America Book That Buzzed” selection
New York Public Library Staff Pick
Oakland Public Library “10 Great Reasons to Read Fiction” selection
#1 BookCourt paperback bestseller
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781942658030
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781942658023
Robert Lopez talks about Good People with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews, Barrelhouse magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Late Night Library, About.com, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, and on the Weekly Reader.
The New York Public Library, Oakland Public Library, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Bookish all agree—Robert Lopez’s Good People should be on your reading list.
Find stories from Good People in Shelf Unbound magazine, Autre Magazine, and on the Storyville app.
Robert Lopez discusses his approach to story writing at TSP: The official blog of The Story Prize.
Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and two story collections, Asunder and Good People. Among other places, his fiction has appeared in the American Reader, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Hobart, Indiana Review, Literarian, Nerve, New York Tyrant, Vice, and the Norton anthology Sudden Fiction Latino. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches fiction writing at The New School, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College.
visit author page »Praise for Good People
Dark humor finds its way into these confessional stories and throughout the collection, the diverse voices ring true. Lopez has said music played a big part in his experience growing up, and it’s apparent in Good People that his writing has found its rhythm.
— Raleigh Review
Tightly knit. . . . Recommended for lovers of darkly humorous, strangely illuminating fiction.
— Booklist
Robert Lopez’s strange, incantatory, visionary stories reveal the mysteries behind the ordinary world. You lift your head from this book and it’s as if a third eye has been opened.
— Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake
Robert Lopez is such a master of saddening hilarities that his virtuoso turns in this crazily heartbreaking, dizzyingly original new collection will restore even the most jaded reader’s faith in the fresh possibilities of American fiction.
— Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way
Robert Lopez is the master of deadpan dread, of the elliptical koan, of the sudden turn of language that reveals life to be so wonderfully absurd. Always with Lopez, the voice is all his—enchanting, surprising, at times devastating.
— Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins
Outsiders and creeps, obsessives and masochists circle through dark corners in Robert Lopez’s short story collection. Master of the vandalized psyche, Lopez’s poetics combine high-octane sonic loops with desperate delusions, to form one of the most stylish and urgent books of 2016.