Father's Mechanical Universe

by Steve Heller

Price 100 pages, $13.95 paper

ISBN 1-886157-32-4

In Father's Mechanical Universe, the American Dream is a quart low and the Kellerman family has to use all its ingenuity, wit and love to keep its motor running. Steve Heller has written a touching, elegiac book that races with 120-octane insight. -- Brent Spencer

Heller's characters have the genius of their own necessity -- learning to live with a plague of bees, financial ruin, and crazy neighbors, they preserve their own tiny corner of the world. This is an authentic American voice that teaches us about the human heart haunted by misdeeds, mysteries and longing. -- Jonis Agee

Father's Mechanical Universe is a marvelously fresh take on the age-old theme of the painfully ambiguous relationship of father and son. There is a powerful irony in the fact that the silence that separates Frank and Curly Kellerman is also the force that binds son to father forever. Narrated by son Curly in a voice that never falters from the right tone, this fiction has all the grit of Oklahoma, and all the hard substance of Frank Kellerman's cluttered workshop. And the metaphors of automobile and open road wonderfully convey the novel's profundity. A balance of the mundane and the mysterious -- the Crow Woman! -- Steve Heller, like the legendary Mantle and Maris, swings for the fence, never playing it safe. -- Gordon Weaver

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Steve Heller grew up near Yukon, Oklahoma, where the events of this story take place. His first book, The Man Who Drank a Thousand Beers, has been called "a Hawaiian Winesburg, Ohio." His first novel, The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman, was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club and received the Friends of American Writers First Prize Award. His short stories and essays have appeared in many journals and national anthologies. His writings have earned various honors, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two O. Henry Awards, the Kansas Artists Fellowship in Fiction, and the Kansas Governor's Arts Award. Heller teaches creative writing at Kansas State University in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife, nonfiction writer Sheyene Foster Heller.
 

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