You are hereMeet the Author: Bruce Machart

Meet the Author: Bruce Machart

Start: 11/10/2011 6:30 pm

End: 11/10/2011 7:30 pm

We loved Bruce Machart's debut novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, which won the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association's 2010 Reading the West award, and we're so happy to welcome him to the shop to celebrate the release of his new short story collection Men in teh Making.

The collection includes ten remarkable stories that tackle what it means to be a man. Whether they find themselves walking the fertile farmland of south Texas, steering trucks through the suffocating sprawl of Houston, or turning logs into loose leaf in the mills just west of the Sabine River, the men of these stories find themselves beset by the insufficiencies of their own ingrained ideas of manhood. Like Richard Russo, Bruce Machart has a profound knowledge of the male psyche and a gift for conveying the absurdity and brutality of daily life with humor and compassion. Alternately lush with lyricism and starkly candid, these stories emerge from inside a vividly scrutinized everyday of farms, refineries, hospitals, and homes to explore what it means to be a man at the rise of a new millennium. What it means to be a man who can't protect his wife from violence, or protect his children from tragic accidents, or protect himself from loss and heartbreak. Machart's characters have a deep and abiding humanity that makes their hardscrabble lives all the more unforgettable.

Bruce Machart fiction has been published in some of the country's finest literary magazines, including Zoetrope: All-Story, Story, One Story, Five Points, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. His short stories have been anthologized in Best Stories of the American West and Descant: Fifty Years. The winner of numerous awards and fellowships, Bruce is a graduate of the MFA program at The Ohio State University.

A native Texan, Bruce was born and raised in the Houston area. His father grew up on a cash-crop farm in rural south Texas not far from the Lavaca County landscape of The Wake of Forgiveness, and Bruce's mother was born in the deep south (and named her son after her favorite little town: Bruce, Mississippi). After high school, Bruce worked his way through eight years of undergraduate study before leaving for the midwest and graduate work in Columbus, Ohio. He later spent three years in the Boston area, where he taught literature and writing at Berklee College of Music, Boston University, and Grub Street Writers. In 2003, he returned to Houston, where he joined the faculty of Lone Star College. He is at work on a second novel.