Bruce
Machart, author of The Wake of
Forgiveness (Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, October 21, 2010), is a graduate of the MFA program at Ohio State
University. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines and
anthologies, including Zoetrope: All-Story,
Story, One Story, Five Points and Glimmer Train, and his collection of stories, Men in the Making, will be published by HMH in 2011.
On your nightstand now:
The Wilding by Benjamin Percy; Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye; Jay Parini's Faulkner biography, One Matchless Time; and The Engineer of Human Souls by the fantastic Czech writer Josef Skvorecky.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Wilson Rawls's Where the Red Fern Grows. I can't wait to read this with my son for the first time. But I have to wait until he's old enough to handle seeing his old man come undone. It still slays me.
Your top five authors:
Right this minute? Richard Yates, Graham Greene, Faulkner, Tolstoy and Miss Eudora Welty.
Book you've faked reading:
The Bible, back in my CCE days during middle school. I've since made my literary Act of Contrition.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Spartina by John Casey. Especially for aspiring writers. Just about everything one needs to know about the inextricable nature of character and place can be learned from Mr. Casey's tour de force.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Kent Haruf's Plainsong. Turns out that what's inside the book is even more beautiful than the arresting landscape on the outside.
Book that changed your life:
All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner. I defy you to read that scene in which the horse falls through the wood-plank bridge without losing some part of yourself and discovering another along the way.
Favorite line from a book:
"Where you going to find enough beer to put out on this here table?"--from Eudora Welty's story "Powerhouse." Powerhouse could pull this off, but when you say this to waitresses these days, they give you a certain look.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. The first reading came as close to epiphany as I may ever come.