A younger person, itinerant and over-connected and uncertain, develops a friendship with an older offbeat family friend after he's summoned to go live with him and serve as a caretaker to a little-disclosed illness. A story of two disparate paths crossing (one of the twentieth and the other the twenty-first century), Goodman is a meditation on our transitory culture; on whether language - thick as a brush but full of Whitmanian possibility - can effectively and heartfully narrate our ever-complicating modern reality.

”Jack Houghteling's voice is both rich and economical, original and familiar with the deepest registers of observation and reflection, illuminating a range of experience, from the technological to the deeply human."—Daniel Mason, Author of The Piano Tuner and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, a Pulitzer Prize finalist

“Jack Houghteling’s Goodman is a wholly sui generis creation: at once dignified epistle and crackling polemic, quiet domestic drama and comedy of digital manners, Kerouackish ramble across America and Rothian character study.” —Ben Goldfarb, Author of Eager, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

"Goodman is a strange, beautiful, original and inventive journey.“—Gabriel Bump, Author of Everywhere You Don't Belong

"Written in a daring high-style, Goodman is a novel I won't soon forget by an author to watch." —Elliot Ackerman, Author of Dark at the Crossing, a National Book Award finalist

“With beauty and wit, Goodman explores the question of how to live an authentic life in the age of technological inauthenticity."—Kate Greathead, Author of Laura and Emma



Jack Houghteling grew up in Hastings on Hudson, NY and holds degrees from Claremont McKenna College and the London School of Economics. His debut novel Goodman was longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction.


Title: Goodman
Author: Jack Houghteling
Publisher: Adelaide Books
Publisher Website: https://adelaidebooks.org/
Publisher Email: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-1956635867
Price: $19.60
Page Count: 146 pages
Format: Paperback

Description of the company: ADELAIDE BOOKS LLC is a New York based independent company dedicated to publishing literary fiction and creative nonfiction. It was founded in July 2017 as an imprint of the Adelaide Literary Magazine, with the aim to facilitate publishing of novels, memoirs, and collections of short stories, poems, and essays by contributing authors of our magazine and other qualified writers.We believe that in doing so, we best fulfill the mission outlined in Adelaide Magazine – “to promote writers we publish, helping both new and emerging, and established authors reaching a wider literary audience.”

Our motto is: We don’t publish classics, we make classics.