Tired of being ashamed of your body? Ask your doctor if this journey to the dark heart of American masculinity is right for you

In a broken-down Middle American town, the disintegration of a struggling family--its ambitions and emotions worn thin--is laid bare through the cold eyes of its only son. While studying at the local community college to finish his degree, he works what his divorced parents deem to be menial jobs and tries to stay out of their way, keeping his pitiless observations about their lives to himself. He says nothing about his semi-estranged father's doomed attempts to find meaning in the world. He says nothing about his mother's willingness to subjugate herself to men he deems unworthy. He says nothing about the anonymity and emptiness to which their social classes and places of birth seem to have condemned everyone he knows, robbing them of even the vocabulary to express their grievances. He says nothing about his own pity, disgust, compassion, disdain, tenderness, and love for them.

But when another in a long line of his father's boozy relationships falls apart, something changes. He wants to have a chat with his boy. The son fully expects to be talking his dad out of committing suicide, but no: the old man has other plans for his carcass. He has, in fact, entered a bodybuilding competition, and wants his son's help to get fit. If the alternative is despair, how can the son refuse?

Instantly relatable, impeccably realized, and grimly hilarious, My Father's Diet is equal parts Kierkegaard, This Side of Paradise, and Pumping Iron: an autopsy of our antiquated notions of manhood, and the perfect, bite-sized novel for a world always keen to mistake narcissism for introspection.

Adrian Nathan West grew up in the United States and lives in Spain. He has translated more than twenty books from Spanish, Catalan, and German, among them Rainald Goetz’s Insane, Pere Gimferrer’s Fortuny, and Marianne Fritz’s The Weight of Things. His translation of Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the International Booker Prize. His first book, The Aesthetics of Degradation, was published in English in 2016 and in German in 2020. His essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals in print and online.

Anthea Butler is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social thought and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. A historian of African American and American religion, Professor Butler’s research and writing spans African American religion and history, race, politics, Evangelicalism, gender and sexuality, media, and popular culture.

Skylit: My Father's Diet, by Adrian Nathan West with Anthea Butler