Bruce Holbert grew up in the country described in Lonesome Animals, a combination of rocky scabland farms and desert brush at the foot of the Okanogan Mountains. What once was the Columbia River, harnessed now by a series of reservoirs and dams, dominates the topography. Holbert’s great-grandfather, Arthur Strahl, was an Indian scout and among the first settlers of the Grand Coulee. The man was a bit of a legend until he murdered Holbert’s grandfather (Strahl’s son-in-law) and made Holbert’s grandmother a widow and Holbert’s father fatherless. A fictionalized Strahl is the subject of Lonesome Animals.
Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where he assisted in editing The Iowa Review and held a Teaching Writing Fellowship. His fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Other Voices, The Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, The Spokesman Review, The West Wind Review, Cairn, RiverLit and has one annual awards from the Tampa Tribune Quarterly and The Inlander. His non-fiction has appeared in The New Orleans Review, The Spokesman Review and The Daily Iowan, and his poetry in RiverLit.
Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where he assisted in editing The Iowa Review and held a Teaching Writing Fellowship. His fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Other Voices, The Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, The Spokesman Review, The West Wind Review, Cairn, RiverLit and has one annual awards from the Tampa Tribune Quarterly and The Inlander. His non-fiction has appeared in The New Orleans Review, The Spokesman Review and The Daily Iowan, and his poetry in RiverLit.
Genres: Literary Fiction
Bruce Holbert recommends
Crippled Jack (2022)
Boston Teran
"Crippled Jack whacks you upside the head from its first page to its final bloody act. Teran's language, like his character, is at times blunt, other times poetic and always barreling like a freight train through an array of robber barons, Pinkerton lackeys and working families mired in poverty and the Colorado silver mines. Wrought with tension and rife with blood as the frontier it inhabits, its hard-scrabble politics and philosophical bent anchors Teran's story with the gravity of a moral reckoning that transcends Crippled Jack's times and mirrors our own."
The Guilt We Carry (2019)
Samuel W Gailey
"An extraordinary thriller, The Guilt We Carry is driven by a plot that is both economic and subtly complicated. Samuel W. Gailey propels his characters into one another with a tough empathy. The result is a tense, scintillating read that is also human and ultimately satisfying as the book hurtles toward its unexpected but well-earned conclusion."