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

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

"It feels too easy to say this book is about fathers and sons and how to be a man in 21st-century America, about the kitschy, trippy joys of roadside America yet also its heartbreaking earnestness, and about the American Midwest: what even is it? (As a Chicago native and recent returnee, I've spent my life pondering this question.) Even the quietest characters in these stories are fighting hard, creatively, and tirelessly for what they want--often before they know what that is. . . . Luckily, idealistically, brokenly, or other, Tim Conrad's characters are defiant in their will to live and love. Their weapons are many and varied (wit, karate, spray-paint, lock-picking skills), and their strength is not to be underestimated. Tim Conrad 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. There's heartbreak here, yes, and real despair, but hope, too. . . . So nestle in, just as if you were curling up in Paul Bunyan's enormous outstretched palm, and enjoy the wonder of stories only Tim Conrad could bring you. I just adore this book!"

-Thisbe Nissen, author of How Other People Make Love

"Tim Conrad's debut story collection takes readers through an American Midwest filled with men and women living on the margins, surrounded by chain-link fences, both resented and needed, not just of the landscape but of the heart. The characters striving in this forgotten America are smart and kind and lost, disappointed by the men in their lives, yet determined to carve out a place in this world. Together, these stories are 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