If the bleak Stockton gyms, Tully’s desperate comebacks, and Ruben Luna’s matter-of-fact corners stuck with you, you’ll feel right at home in Rope Burns. Toole (a real-life cutman) peels back the canvas to show busted hands, brutal weight cuts, and managers who can’t save their fighters from themselves. Stories like “Million $$$ Baby” carry that same hard mercy you felt when Tully kept getting up—less about glory than about what staying in the game costs.

You cared about Tully and Ernie not for titles but for their day-to-day scrabble—the cheap apartments, the lousy jobs, the way a gym or a ring can feel like home. In Lean on Pete, Charley Thompson hustles work at a rundown racetrack, clinging to a washed-up quarter horse as his one steady thing. Like Tully picking crops between fights, Charley moves from odd job to odd job, the world closing in—tender, plainspoken, and devastating in the same quiet register.

If Ernie’s fumbling steps into adulthood and Tully’s barroom spirals drew you in for their inner ache, Jesus’ Son taps the same vein of wandering souls. The narrator—“Fuckhead”—stumbles through ER shifts, car wrecks, and motel rooms, chasing highs and human connection much like Tully chasing one more round. Johnson’s scenes—like the harrowing “Car Crash While Hitchhiking”—have that same spare, bruised clarity that made the quiet moments in Fat City hit so hard.

If you were riveted by the tedium and tension of Tully’s roadwork, the dull ache after bad rounds, and the small rituals in the Lido Gym, The Professional lives in that rhythm. It follows contender Eddie Brown and his trainer through sparring partners, weight, injuries, and negotiations—every quiet decision that adds up before the bell. Like Ernie’s first steps into the ring, it’s a slow burn where the fight is only the capstone to months of doubt, discipline, and hope.

If the crop fields, dingy rooms, and low paychecks shaping Tully and Ernie’s choices stuck with you, Ironweed will resonate. Francis Phelan wanders Depression-era Albany, haunted by past mistakes and scraping by among men and women the world overlooks—much like the fighters and barflies orbiting Stockton. Kennedy brings the same tough tenderness to those left on the ropes, finding shards of grace without sanding down the hurt.