SOFT-BOILED: an Investigation of Masculinity & the Writer’s Life
Kelson Books, July 2022 – Order now
Soft-Boiled follows Stephen J. West as he shadows a private investigator by the name of Frank Streets. What starts out as a last-ditch effort to write West’s first book—while juggling responsibilities as a husband and a new father—becomes a critical reflection on art-making, storytelling, and masculinity in America. Blending memoir, reportage, criticism, and detective thriller into one capacious yet focused narrative, Soft-Boiled is a lyrical and aching self-reflexive portrait of an artist that asks the questions so many men are afraid to ask.
“Me, the one unblushing American male. Yet I blush, dear reader. I blush for my desire to matter more than my privilege. I blush for my need to make art, even when my art is not needed. I blush because Frank Streets springs from that necessity.”
“In Soft-Boiled, Stephen J. West cracks open American masculinity by examining sociology, detective fiction, his own changing life, and a boulder of a man named Frank Streets, the West Virginia private investigator who might not be just what he seems. Soft-Boiled is hilarious and heartfelt, unflinching and meticulous. This book will make you rethink what it means to be a man and to be an artist in the ever-changing landscape of America.”—Jeremy B. Jones, author of Bearwallow
“Soft-Boiled is a magical genre remix that challenges received ideas of American Manhood and the Lone Artist, while simultaneously delivering a thrilling and comedic detective noir and moving family drama.”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
“In tackling a subject as ever-present and fraught as masculinity, it’s easy for writers to retreat to the two poles of the conversation: romance or ridicule. All the more remarkable, then, that Stephen J. West dances around that trap, with prose that is wry and funny and skeptical, but also deeply heartfelt and true. Soft-Boiled leaves no stone unturned in its investigation of this unified myth of American manhood, and West is a smart, fun, kind-hearted investigator, willing—like Frank Streets, the enigma at the book’s center—to let us ride along and see what happens next.”—Lucas Mann, author of Captive Audience
“Like an exquisite film noir, Stephen J. West’s Soft-Boiled defies expectations in the best of ways. What begins as the story of a wannabe Watson chronicling a real-life, Appalachian Sherlock Holmes turns into a perplexing mystery of a more personal kind, as the author investigates how a thoughtful, sensitive man can be a better father, partner, artist, and human being. This beguiling hybrid of a book had me entranced from start to finish, and left me pondering not just the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be a man in America, but the art of storytelling itself.”—Brian Gresko, editor of When I First Held You