The Machine We Trust

<p><strong>Winner Short Story/Anthology <em>Midwest Book Awards</em> (2025)</strong></p><p></p><p>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 <em>The Machine We Trust</em> 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.</p>