Stories for Men

Seventeen-year-old Erno, under the spell of a rude stand-up comedian who calls himself Tyler Durden, rebels against the women-dominated lunar society he grew up in. Problem: Erno's mom is a cop. Tiptree Award Winner, Nebula Award(R) Finalist, Sturgeon Award Nominee. “Stories for Men” is a story about masculinity, about how individuals define themselves in the context of kinship and community, and about how we construct gender roles by telling ourselves stories. The story begins with a female-centered society that mirrors some of our assumptions about social power relations between men and women, and then explicitly refers to our own society’s assumptions (in the main character’s encounter with a twentieth-century fiction anthology) in a way that makes those assumptions seem new and strange. It reexamines those tales of outcasts and lone heroes and manly individualism within the context of a story of community. It raises questions about the links between connectedness and exclusion, consensus and stifling conformity, patriarchal protectiveness and sociopathy. “Stories for Men” is a short work, one that’s more subtle than it first appears.