The Machine We Trust - by Tim Conrad (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

WINNER, Short Story/Anthology, Midwest Book Awards (2025)

A boy attends summer camp where campers are tasked with managing their own flocks of sheep; a set of brothers kidnap their father's prized pet buffalo; a young man travels the country with his mother, a peripatetic professor who has pioneered a radical service-learning curriculum; an unemployed man attempts to teach himself to beat a polygraph test. In The Machine We Trust, Tim Conrad's narrators and characters come of age in a surreal American landscape-sometimes late, sometimes unsuccessfully. With exacting prose that searches and clutches, Conrad exposes the cracks where hearts are broken, and redemption is just one chance away.

Review Quotes

"Luckily, idealistically, brokenly, or other, Tim Conrad's characters are defiant in their will to live and love. . . . He is something of a Raymond Carver for the new millennium; his everyday people glow with the power of loss and suppressed longing."

-Wendy Brenner, author of Large Animals In Everyday Life

"Gifted with a devilish wit like Lorrie Moore's, George Saunders' marvelous sense of the weird, and a gloriously imaginative and utterly compelling voice entirely his own, Tim Conrad gives us tales both fantastically fabulist and devastatingly true."

-Thisbe Nissen, author of How Other People Make Love

"A tender portrait of our desire for love and acceptance, all told in language that is suspenseful, moving, and perfectly written."

-Michael Nye, author of Until We Have Faces