A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley
Published 2018 · 256 pages · 64,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Short Fiction
How hard is A Lucky Man to read?
A Lucky Man scores 42 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 35 out of 100
- Contemporary American prose, accessible and sharp.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Varied across stories, all readable.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- Questions of luck, race, and American life.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Each story efficiently establishes world.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- Stories imply rather than state themes.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- Luck and circumstance carry thematic weight.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Butler maintains knowing distance.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- Stories end but lives continue.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Linked story collection.
How A Lucky Man is regarded
A Lucky Man holds a literary regard score of 53 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.