Published May 6, 2026 at 11:39 AM CDT

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The stories in “A History of Heartache” by Patrick Strickland are set in North Texas in places where boys have to grow up fast and men are haunted by things they can’t control.

There are fathers and sons here — and mothers. Sometimes they are single mothers who can’t always keep an eye on things at home.

There is a grittiness here in these stories — but also a brand of tenderness. We find the characters looking back at mistakes they’ve made in life as part of this "history of heartache" that they can’t rewrite or even reimagine.

And yet, what they experience and go through isn’t so far removed from us.

As the author explains in the interview, we all go through life thinking that if we could change just one thing, everything would be better.

Is life really ever that easy — for any of us?

Comparisons between Patrick Strickland and Breece D’J Pancake and Denis Johnson are not overstated. Fans of these authors, their spare prose, their clear-eyed storytelling, their subjects of sorrow and loss — but also of grace — will know that Patrick Strickland–an award-winning journalist and writer of nonfiction — is a fiction writer who is here to stay.

Melville House

Patrick Strickland

Guest:
Patrick Strickland is the author of the story collection, A History of Heartache. It’s published by Melville House. He is a journalist from Texas. He's the author of three nonfiction books on the far right and migration: You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave (2025), The Marauders (2022), and Alerta! Alerta! Snapshots of Europe's Antifascist Struggle (2018). His reporting has appeared at The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Time, Al Jazeera, and elsewhere. His fiction has appeared in Epiphany, Pithead Chapel, and the Porter House Review, among others. The de Groot Foundation picked him as a 2024 Writer of Note. He is currently the managing editor of Inkstick Media, based in Athens, Greece.