Standalone Novels
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Books Make Brainz Taste Bad | 2020 | Buy |
| Don’t Know Tough | 2022 | Buy |
| Ozark Dogs | 2023 | Buy |
| Broiler | 2024 | Buy |
| Mississippi Blue 42 | 2025 | Buy |
Eli Cranor grew up in Arkansas and spent years coaching high school and college football before turning to fiction. That background bleeds into his writing, which returns repeatedly to small-town athletes, broken families, and communities where reputation and violence are intertwined. His debut novel Don’t Know Tough put him on the map in the literary thriller world and announced him as a writer with real range.
His books are set in and around rural Arkansas, and the landscape is never just backdrop. Poverty, pride, and the particular pressures of small communities shape everything his characters do. Cranor writes about people who are trying to escape something and finding that the thing they’re escaping is partly inside them.
Readers coming to Cranor for the first time are usually advised to start with Don’t Know Tough, which earned strong critical attention and showed what he could do with character and moral weight. His subsequent books have continued in the same vein, each one finding a different angle into Southern American life and its friction points.