Alex Mindt, author of Male of the Species, is a storyteller, playwright, and filmmaker whose work has been published in numerous magazines, produced on the stage in Seattle and Los Angeles, and screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
Alex Mindt on Fathers
The title story of this highly praised book, about a small-town Texas science teacher threatening to flunk his high school’s brilliantly talented football star, sets the collection’s timely theme, the conflict between the image of how American men are supposed to act and the way they secretly feel like acting.
This theme is skillfully modulated in almost all of the book’s eleven selections—from “Stories of the Hunt,” about a boy discovering that his ostensibly he-man woodsman father doesn’t in fact know the first thing about tracking deer, to “Immigration,” about a Vietnamese refugee working in a Las Vegas casino and dreaming of becoming the worlds greatest Elvis impersonator.
Alex Mindt seems instinctively to know all the angles of story-telling, from quickly building dramatic tension to creating vivid characters through a minimum of dialogue. His every turn of phrase smolders in the reader’s mind.
“Alex Mindt writes stories with muscle, moral intensity, and language that is both brisk and readable. His variation on the familiar ‘teen-age son goes deer-hunting with his father’ theme is priceless. But so is every other story in this remarkable, memorable, artful collection.”
“Although the author masterfully orchestrates different voices, these are not experimental fictions. They are solid, traditional stories with confident endings, that neither resolve too little or too much.”
Alex Mindt has published stories in numerous magazines, including the Missouri Review, Fiction, Confrontation, the Literary Review, and The Sun. His plays have been produced in Seattle and Los Angeles, and he co-wrote, directed, and produced the feature film Nowheresville, which screened at the Cannes Film Festival and on Showtime and won the audience award at the Las Vegas International Film Festival. He has taught at the Gotham Writers' Workshop and Columbia University. Alex holds a BA from the University of Iowa and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University.
Columbia University - MFA
University of Iowa - BA