Four for a Quarter: A Reading by Michael Martone

Michael Martone is the author of numerous books including Fort Wayne is Seventh of Hitler's List; Double-Wide; The Blue Guide to Indiana; and The Flatness & Other Landscapes, among others.  His most recent collection of fiction is Four for a Quarter: Fictions.  Martone has won two Fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His stories have won awards in the Italian Americana fiction contest, the Florida Review Short Story Contest, the Story magazine Short, Short Story Contest, the Margaret Jones Fiction Prize of Black Ice Magazine, and the first World's Best Short, Short Story Contest. His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies.

Michael Martone is currently a Professor at the University of Alabama where he has been teaching since 1996. He has been a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1988. He has taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University, and Syracuse University.

Early Reviews

 "Reading Michael Martone’s FOUR FOR A QUARTER is like flipping through radio stations in your car in the middle of the night in West Texas, a wash of wonderful elegiac fragments, memories,anecdotes, haunting bits and pieces of ordinary days, from Beatles’ backstories to the Eat Mor Chikin cow, from Santa Claus to baseball under the lights to six sad ways to lose a baby.  Always engaging, at times funny, utterly affecting, this remarkable collection leads us through a dizzying collage of times, places, people and things, sights and sounds at once thrilling and scary. You’ll have a hard time putting it down, and when you do, you’ll be eager to get back to it. A masterful performance."--Frederick Barthelme