Male Tears

Susan Midalia's Review

An award-winning journalist and author of historical fiction, crime fiction and poetry, British author Benjamin Myers has now produced a chilling collection of short stories. Male Tears is an example of what literary critics call ‘rural noir’: fiction set in often ominous or decaying rural landscapes in which male characters succumb to the lure of violence or become victims of deadly agricultural machines. However, the stories are less concerned with exploring the masculine psyche and more an evocation of settings depicted as either hostile to masculine endeavour or symbols of a disturbing desire for power. Carefully crafted works of realism and allegory, these thrillingly tense and wonderfully atmospheric stories will certainly stay with you – whether you’d like them to or not!  

Publishers Reviews

'One of the most singular, moving and crucial voices of our times' David Peace
In Male Tears, a debut collection of stories that brings together over fifteen years of work, Benjamin Myers lays bare the male psyche in all its fragility, complexity and failure, its hubris and forbidden tenderness. Farmers, fairground workers and wandering pilgrims, gruesome gamekeepers, bare-knuckle boxers and ex-cons with secret passions, the men that populate these unsettling, wild and wistful stories form a multi-faceted, era-spanning portrait of just what it means to be a man.