Meet Mark, Operations Manager

I’ve loved books for as long as I can remember. In high school I discovered satire and devoured everything by Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut introduced me to Céline who, in a sense, introduced me to the importance of translation. How could something as visceral as Death On the Installment Plan, I wondered, be rendered so beautifully from French into English? I spent my twenties obsessed by the 19th Century Russians, mostly Dostoevsky, but also Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Lermontov. 

My obsession is still books, and a large amount of those have been translated into English. Of course I also love English language writers too: Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Donald Antrim, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy to name a few.

In 2008 I had a collection of stories, Deathbed Conversions, published. In 2017 it was translated into Spanish and published by Editorial Argonautica in a bilingual edition. My first novel, Reinhardt’s Garden, was published by Coffee House Press in 2019 and nominated for a PEN/Hemingway Award. My second novel, Saint Sebastian's Abyss, will be published in May 2022.

One of the best aspects of working in a bookstore is having great conversations about books with the customers and (selfishly) having great books introduced to me as well. I hope to see you in Brazos Bookstore!

Mark's book recommendations
Mark's Kids book recommendations