Nominating Lucky Man, Lucky Woman for the Pushcart Editors' Book Award, Rick Bass called it "one of the best novels I've read all year--an incredible story, not of high drama but rather of a marriage, of all things." Perry Lafond, approaching forty, knows he's had a decent life with his attractive, longtime wife, Marcia. But he's come to the point where he is not sure that he can continue on. In the meantime, there's the question of children. His wife, battling infertility, is obsessed with the idea of having a baby. Perry wants a child too--maybe. Suddenly, he can't keep his mind off other women. In his job as a probation officer he becomes recklessly infatuated with the pretty, beleaguered wife of a parolee who has a young child. Perry's own confusion endangers this child as well as a nephew under his care. Always unflinchingly honest, Jack Driscoll tracks a man's headlong--and just possibly redemptive--leap into chaos.

Lucky Man, Lucky Woman (Norton Paperback Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Driscoll, Jack

Literary

W.W.Norton&Company

"How Like an Angel is a powerfully imagined, lyrically wrought novel, overflowing with the senses. Jack Driscoll is a marvel."---Rick Bass"How Like an Angel is a lyrical, lonely ode to fatherhood, an aria in words that looks forward and backward at once. Jack Driscoll is a writer of deep heart, relentless honesty, uncanny gentleness, and irresistible spirit."---Pam HoustonHow Like an Angel is the story of Archibald Angel. With his career going nowhere and a marriage in decline, Angel retreats to a rustic cabin in northern Michigan to make a new life for himself. In spite of his forward thinking, Angel's move is in many ways a journey into the past. Besides lacking modern comforts, the cabin conjures the ghost of Angel's troubled childhood, when his undertaker father took the cabin in trade as payment from a widow who couldn't otherwise afford the cost of her husband's burial. After Angel's mother subsequently fled, abandoning her family to recover from a mental breakdown, the cabin was an escape for father and son.While Archibald Angel revisits his knotted and difficult past, his ex-wife and young son contemplate their future. Slowly, with unexpected help from an unpredictable woman, Angel realizes he too must find a way to begin again or risk failing his son as his own father failed him.With pathos, humor, and unflagging generosity of spirit, How Like an Angel takes us deep into the hinterland of the human heart and discovers there the source of the love that keeps us holding on against all odds.

How Like an Angel: A Novel (Sweetwater Fiction: Originals)

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN REGIONAL

Although his father expects him to attend the University of Michigan, Buddy enrolls at Amherst to be near his older and very wealthy girlfriend.

Skylight

Teen & Young Adult

Orchard Books

If Earl Patrick Godfrey can only make it across the bridge, there is a woman waiting. She calls herself Miranda Mtn., is double-jointed, tattooed from toes to navel, and has one blue eye, one brown. She's nothing like Diane, Earl's ex, whose voice of conscience he's been trying to escape since he stole the Ranchero 500 he lost to her in the divorce settlement. Earl just wants to take the "half car, half pickup" for one last sentimental spin to the Chippewa casino near the Michigan/Canada border and risk everything, one last time, in hopes of striking it rich. Miranda Mtn., a dealer at the casino, slips him a straight flush worth twelve thousand, eight hundred and seventy dollars (after taxes) and then passes him a tight-folded, red-lettered note. "Check into Ojibway Hotel - rm. 411. Your name: Johnny Ace." But there are ways and then there are ways of hitting it big, including some delirious sex in a beach house on Cape May, a wild night of roulette in Atlantic City, and a pistol-punctuated Thanksgiving (for Miranda's past stalks her as resolutely as Earl's past stalks him). With a comic/tragic urgency that both tantalizes and delights, Earl Patrick Godfrey speeds headlong into a surprising and final starlit scene of breath-stopping mystery and redemption. It's here, after a thousand dangerous and hilarious road miles - where all the voices of advice and complaint are finally silenced - that he has the last best word.

Stardog

DK PUBLISHING

DK Pub.

In The World of a Few Minutes Ago, award-winning author Jack Driscoll renders ten stories from the point of view of characters aged fourteen to seventy-seven with a consistently deep understanding of each character's internal world and emotional struggles. All of the stories are set against the quiet, powerful northern Michigan landscape and share a sense of longing, amplified by the beautiful but often unforgiving surroundings. With keen attention to the nuances of his characters and their lives, Driscoll explores both their attachments to the past and their as-yet-unseen futures as he considers relationships between loves, old friends, and parents and their children.
A twelve-year-old boy accompanies his father on a secret run to the slaughterhouse where he recently lost his job. A middle-aged divorcé waits to witness the execution of the man who murdered his daughter decades earlier. A seventy-seven-year-old man reassesses both his fifty-year marriage and his career as an AP war photographer. A sixteen-year-old girl drives through a snowstorm in a clandestine meeting with her driver's education instructor. A twentysomething couple breaks into houses to ignite the passion in their relationship. Each story is carefully crafted and lovingly delivered, as characters weigh their own feelings against their complicated perceptions of other people and the action swirling around them. Driscoll's Michigan shapes these people as surely as their grief and joy, as the setting often becomes a physical touchstone to which characters turn to navigate the immensity of the unknown universe.
Few authors have the flexibility of voice and the emotional range and depth of Driscoll, who is at his best in this collection. Readers of fiction will enjoy The World of A Few Minutes Ago.

The World of a Few Minutes Ago (Made in Michigan Writer Series)

United States

Wayne State University Press

Elmore Leonard said about Jack Driscoll's stories, "The guy can really write." And in The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot, he once again demonstrates in every sentence the grace and grit of a true storyteller. The ten stories are mostly set in Michigan's northern lower peninsula, a landscape as gorgeous as it is severe. If at times the situations in these stories appear hopeless, the characters nonetheless, and even against seemingly impossible odds, dare to hope. These fictional individuals are so compassionately rendered that they can hardly help but be, in the hands of this writer, not only redeemed but made universal. 
The stories are written from multiple points of view and testify to Driscoll's range and understanding of human nature, and to how "the heart in conflict with itself" always defines the larger, more meaningful story. A high school pitching sensation loses his arm in a public school classroom during show and tell. A woman lives all of her ages in one day. A fourteen-year-old boy finds himself alone after midnight in a rowboat in the middle of the lake with his best friend's mother. Driscoll is a prose stylist of the highest order - a voice as original as the stories he tells. 
Lovers of contemporary storytelling will revel in Driscoll's skill and insight on display in this unique collection.

The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot (Made in Michigan Writer Series)

Wanting Only to Be Heard (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction)

The stories in this memorable collection explore the rigors of life in northern Michigan, a harsh terrain where winters linger, marriages often fail, and the emotional climate can be as severe as the physical one. Jack Driscoll writes about ordinary working-class people struggling to get along as best they can. With remarkable control, he portrays the uncertainty and impulsiveness of boys on the edge of manhood, the loneliness of women cut off from their families, and the ambivalence and anger of men who have come to see that love is neither simple nor secure. In the title story, three boys in the dead of winter test their theory that it should be possible to swim underwater from one ice-fishing hole to the next. In "Pig and Lobsters" a son watches his father plan a fancy dinner for a date who never arrives, the father's anticipation turning to rage as the evening unfolds. "August Sales" tells the story of a census worker with a chronic sleepwalking disorder who is haunted by his wife's decision to leave him. The protagonist of "Devotion," a woman recovering from dental surgery, finds herself holding a gun on a young intruder who has broken into her house. In each story, Driscoll masterfully conveys the fragility of human contact and the complex topography of the heart.

University of Massachusetts Press

Fishing the Backwash

History & Criticism

Ithaca House

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Driscoll, Jack. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Driscoll, Jack

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Driscoll, Jack. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Lucky Man, Lucky Woman (Norton Paperback Fiction)

How Like an Angel: A Novel (Sweetwater Fiction: Originals)

Skylight

Skylight

Stardog

The World of a Few Minutes Ago (Made in Michigan Writer Series)

The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot (Made in Michigan Writer Series)

Wanting Only to Be Heard (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction)

Wanting Only to Be Heard (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction)

Fishing the Backwash