Dustin M. Hoffman writes stories about working people. His newest story collection is
Such a Good Man. He’s also the author of the story collection
No Good for Digging and the fiction chapbook
Secrets of the Wild. His first book
One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. He’s published more than one hundred stories in journals including
Black Warrior Review,
Alaska Quarterly Review,
Ninth Letter,
Masters Review,
Witness,
Wigleaf,
The Threepenny Review,
Gulf Coast, and
One Story. Before getting his MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University and his PhD in creative writing from Western Michigan University, he spent ten years painting houses in Michigan. Now he lives in South Carolina and teaches creative writing at Winthrop University.
At Electric Lit Hoffman tagged "
twelve books of poetry and prose that depict not just working-class people but that foreground work as the feature." One title on the list:
Temporary by Hilary Leichter
In Adam Petty’s astute essay “Dirty Life and Times: The Past, Present and Future of Working-Class Literature,” he asks a question: “We’ve had Kmart realism; why not Walmart realism?” 
Or what about Amazon realism? It’s certainly going to get surreal, globalized and computerized, guided by algorithm, surely even more alienating. Saunders led the way, and Hilary Leichter pushes the tradition forward with her highly stylized, experimental novel Temporary. Here the narrator weaves between temporary jobs, though each one seems to encompass an inescapable universe. This novel is full of humor, while also taking very seriously the cruelty of our modern world that makes every worker expendable, no matter how essential. The narrator searches for permanence in this picaresque plot of temporary jobs, but no such anchor is to be found in this magical labor-led universe that funhouse-mirrors our own. There’s so much gritty authenticity in the details of labor, as the jobs flit between realistic and absurd: pirate-deck swabber, door opener, assassin assistant, pamphlet distributor, replacement mother. Even the narrator’s lovers, a swarm of boyfriends she speaks to over the phone, are a writhing mass of slipping identities that require yet more labor.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
No Good for Digging and the fiction chapbook Secrets of the Wild. His first book One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. He’s published more than one hundred stories in journals including Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Masters Review, Witness, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and One Story. Before getting his MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University and his PhD in creative writing from Western Michigan University, he spent ten years painting houses in Michigan. Now he lives in South Carolina and teaches creative writing at Winthrop University.
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