From LadLit to Lit That Lads Need

How BOLD reclaims the narrative from Hornby hangovers and gives it back to the broken, beautiful, and brutally honest.

I love Nick Hornby. I really do. High Fidelity is one of my favourite novels — funny, vulnerable, a bit neurotic in that way only men with vinyl collections and commitment issues can be. The film adaptation? Perfect. Cusack’s fourth-wall monologues, Jack Black’s chaos, that Springsteen cameo — it’s comfort food for the emotionally stunted.

But here’s the thing.

That kind of masculinity — the record-shop confessional, the sad man learning how to feel just enough to win her back — it only gets you so far. Hornby’s lads knew how to list their top five heartbreaks. The writers in BOLD? They’re writing from the middle of the sixth one, with no promise of resolution, no cool soundtrack, no happy ending on the way.

This isn’t ladlit. This is lit that lads — and anyone caught in masculinity’s long shadow — actually need.

From Fictional Blokes to Lyrical Wreckage

BOLD isn’t nostalgia for a softer masculinity. It’s a spiky, multilingual shout into the void of manhood. It’s the literary equivalent of pulling your own guts out and pinning them to the page—not to show off, but because you don’t know what else to do.

Take Italo Ferrante’s What My Father (Not A Poet) Might Say — a riotous, grotesque inventory of masculine inheritance. It’s offensive, absurd, brilliant. It rips apart the idea that men only express themselves through stoicism or suicide. Here, the father’s voice is loud, ugly, and unforgettable. He’s no literary hero—he’s the bloke who taught you how to hate yourself, laugh it off, and carry on.

Or look at David Hanlon’s Man Strength — a piece that starts in the weight room and ends underwater, breath held, nowhere to surface. It’s a poem that reclaims tenderness, but not by rejecting masculinity — instead, it reframes it. Here, strength is not in the biceps but in the blooming heart. This isn’t gym-bro wellness culture — it’s poetic resistance against every insult ever thrown at a ‘batty boy’.

These aren’t characters learning to be better men. They’re writers refusing to lie about the men they were, are, or might become.

A Cultural Pivot, Not a Cry for Help

Let’s be clear: BOLD is not trauma porn. It doesn’t ask the reader to pity its contributors or clutch pearls at their pain. It demands engagement. Respect. Maybe even discomfort.

It’s a masculinity anthology for a generation that grew up on Hornby, weaned on Welsh, got their hearts broken to The Smiths, but then had to reckon with #MeToo, rising suicide stats, and a sense that ‘being a man’ is either a joke or a threat. The lads are tired. But they’re still here. Writing.

And that’s what this collection gives us: the indie poetry the lads never got in school. The kind of male mental health writing that doesn’t need a hotline number at the end because the poem is the call.

A New Canon, a New Conversation

What unites BOLD isn’t a singular masculinity — it’s the refusal to perform one. Each poem doesn’t say this is what being a man feels like — it says this is what being inside masculinity does to people.

We don’t need another sad man buying vinyl records to show he has feelings. We need men — and others — writing poetry that bleeds, resists, questions, rages.

Remember BOLD isn’t LadLit. It’s Lit that lads — and everyone else — actually need.