The Machine We Trust

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.

Tim Conrad holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a PhD from Western Michigan University. His work has been published in journals such as Story, Willow Springs, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Quarterly West. He teaches creative writing at Michigan State University.