Head Of Household by Oliver Munday

God bless short stories for how easily digestible they are, having stripped away so much extraneous matter to properly capture a mood and make a point, at least, tho not exclusively, in the literary genre.

Oliver Munday’s new collection of ten short stories exemplify this, almost to the point where I wanted more from several of the stories and felt that those works would have been better served as longer pieces. This is, tbc, different from feeling that the story could serve as the basis for a novel despite feeling complete in and of itself: fortunately there are far more of this latter than the former kind here. The opening story Fists, for example, is perfect as a tone piece about a father not knowing how to deal with the loss of his own youth, as he and his teenage daughter go on one of their annual vacations together. Would I love to read more about what happens next? Yes. Was it perfectly satisfactory on its own? Also yes.

Sterling, on the other hand, was one of those stories with too much build up and not enough denouement. Perhaps I am biased in this, however, as a committed Washington DC-lover who wanted to know exactly what happened at the end of the story. I was also far more inclined to feel kindly towards the older heroes (yes, all men) of these pieces. I had a lot more sympathy for the destructive — self or otherwise — urges of the parents who’d been through a lot and were still trying to cope as best they could. For example, Tom, the protagonist of Pizza Party, has to go through a mortifying destruction of the ego before he can find grace, as does the unnamed narrator of the collection’s closing story Dependents, tho in a very different way. Their struggles felt far more earned to me than the thrashing about of most of the younger protagonists showcased here.

Unsurprisingly for a collection with this title, the stories primarily revolve around a man’s relationship with his children, and often with the long-suffering mother of same (the men are all, so far as I can tell, heterosexual and cis.) Occasionally, the relationship between a man and his father is also examined. The one story where I actually felt more sympathy for the younger half of that equation was New Motion, as Chris is forced to accept a favor from his dad. It really highlighted the tension that can underscore the hand-off of centrality that exists for procreating males in patriarchal family systems.

And really, that’s what this collection is about, how modern-day men deal with patriarchy and its suffocating systems. Perhaps surprisingly, the older gentlemen tended to cope better than the younger ones, especially where the intersection with white privilege occurs. I was infuriated with the choices of the protagonists of both Vandals and Feeders, for how they made life more difficult for the vulnerable as the main characters sought to console their own egos. Interestingly, I believe that that was the point of those stories, to show how complicit men can still be in the systems they think are trapping them.

This is an accomplished, thought-provoking collection of polished prose that’s easy to consume but definitely takes a little longer to digest. I spent a lot of time thinking about how how these stories would resonate if they had been about women, in no small part to try to evoke greater sympathy from me as a reader. Ultimately, I decided that they work really well just the way they are, in their multi-faceted examination of modern manhood.

Head Of Household by Oliver Mundy was published February 17 2026 by Simon & Schuster and is available from all good booksellers, including