According to Esquire magazine, these are the 12 authors every man (and woman) should know:

Saul Bellow  - The Adventures of Augie March

Everything you need to know about what propels the American male: “I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”

Raymond Carver - Where I’m Calling From

A car hits a boy. A woman licks whiskey off her lover’s belly. Nobody captures the darkness and hopefulness of everyday America better.

Cormac McCarthy – Blood Meridian

Because he tells a truth most don’t want to hear: that man is capable of terrible evil.

Zadie Smith - White Teeth

This is how smart, beautiful, post racial women think. This is prose so kinetic, it seems to break-dance.

William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying

Sometimes you must see the world through a fractured lens.

Flannery O’Connor - The Complete Stories

Because: “She would of been a good woman … if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” We all would.

Stephen King - The Stand

No writer knows more about our current cultural fears — the cold-war anxiety of The Dead Zone, the post-9/11 fearfulness of Under the Dome — than Uncle Stevie.

Graham Greene - The Quiet American

Have you ever felt as though you can’t trust anyone, not your friends or your lovers, not your boss, your family, not your god, not even yourself?

George Orwell – Down and Out in Paris and London

Because he is angry, uncompromising, and unapologetically political.

Phillip Roth - American Pastoral

He understands that at base, we’re a nation of fearful womanizers. Plus, he wrote the only great novel to end with a guy getting poked in the eye with a fork.

Norman Mailer - The Executioner’s Song

Because behind the grandstanding — the run for mayor, the head-butting of Gore Vidal — you can sense that Mailer was as much a fragile soul as the last great literary man.

William Shakespeare – Henry V

We all come out of Shakespeare’s pen — every one of us, every one of our stories of revenge, of ambition, of baleful and nectarous and incestuous love.

Read globally but buy from your local independent bookstore and keep more revenue in your community.