From the author of The Wake of Forgiveness— "a mesmerizing, mythic saga"*—ten remarkable stories that tackle what it means to be a man Whether they find themselves walking the fertile farmland of south Texas, steering trucks through the suffocating sprawl of Houston, or turning logs into loose leaf in the mills just west of the Sabine River, the men of these stories find themselves beset by the insufficiencies of their own ingrained ideas of manhood. Like Richard Russo, Bruce Machart has a profound knowledge of the male psyche and a gift for conveying the absurdity and brutality of daily life with humor and compassion. Alternately lush with lyricism and starkly candid, these stories emerge from inside a vividly scrutinized everyday of farms, refineries, hospitals, and homes to explore what it means to be a man at the rise of a new millennium. What it means to be a man who can't protect his wife from violence, or protect his children from tragic accidents, or...

"A mesmerizing, mythic saga" of a Texas family damaged by a dark past, and a son driven by a need for redemption (The New York Times Book Review). On a moonless Texas night in 1895, an ambitious young landowner suffers the loss of his wife—"the only woman he's ever been fond of"—when she dies giving birth to their fourth son, Karel. The boy is forever haunted by thoughts of the mother he never knew and the bloodshot blame in his father's eyes, and is permanently marked by the yoke he and his brothers are forced to wear to plow the family fields. But from an early age, Karel proves remarkably talented on horseback, and his father enlists him to ride in horseraces against his neighbors, with acreage as the prize. Now, Karel prepares for a high-stakes race against a powerful Spanish patriarch and his alluring daughters—and hanging in the balance are his father's fortune, his brothers' futures, and his own fate—in...