Background
John Raymond McNally was born on November 8, 1965, in Oak Lawn, Illinois, United States. He is the son of Robert and Margie (Triplett) McNally.
1263 Lincoln Dr, Carbondale, IL 62901, United States
Southern Illinois University Carbondale where John McNally received his Bachelor of Arts degree.
21 N Clinton St, Iowa City, IA 52242, United States
The University of Iowa where John McNally received his Master of Fine Arts degree.
1400 R Street, Lincoln, NE 68588, United States
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln where John McNally received his Doctor of Philosophy degree.
(High Infidelity, an anthology of stories that share the c...)
High Infidelity, an anthology of stories that share the common theme of adultery, includes works by such well-known authors as John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Ethan Canin, Russell Banks, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Russell Banks, and Bharati Mukherjee.
https://www.amazon.com/High-Infidelity-Stories-Adultery-Contemporary/dp/0688151744
1997
(Troublemakers is an often hilarious, sometimes frightenin...)
Troublemakers is an often hilarious, sometimes frightening, occasionally off-the-wall collection of stories about men living on the edge. From the streets of Chicago's southwest side to the rural roads of Nebraska to the small towns of southern Illinois, these men tread a very fine line between right and wrong, love and hate, humor, and horror. Each story is a Pandora's box waiting to be opened.
https://www.amazon.com/Troublemakers-John-McNally/dp/0877457271
2000
(Fiction, like life, has its lessons, and it's a wild ride...)
Fiction, like life, has its lessons, and it's a wild ride on the learning curve when storytelling goes to school. The short stories in this collection negotiate the heights, the depths, and the unexpected angles of campus intrigue, sexual and intellectual awakenings and reckonings, and all the heartache and hilarity of sentimental education. The work of such well-known authors as Stephen King, Marly Swick, and Ron Carlson appears here as well as stories by most promising new voices.
https://www.amazon.com/Student-Body-Stories-Students-Professors/dp/0299174042
2001
(This collection of humorous works by writers of color inc...)
This collection of humorous works by writers of color includes the work of Sherman Alexie, Erika Lopez, Jim Northrup, Gish Jen, Charles Johnson, and Lucille Clifton, among others.
https://www.amazon.com/Humor-Me-Anthology-Writers-Color/dp/0877458081
2002
(All of us need a Ralph in our lives. Chicago, 1978. Hank ...)
All of us need a Ralph in our lives. Chicago, 1978. Hank Boyd, a solid B+ student, a good kid, wants eighth grade to be his special year. But when Ralph, an oddball troublemaker who's been held back twice, gets the idea that he and Hank are pals, Hank's year devolves into an odyssey as frightening as it is hilarious. John McNally deftly portrays the astonishing, sometimes terrifying world of adolescence in 1970s America: the adult world becomes increasingly untrustworthy, the economy plummets, and families seem to be falling apart, yet the two boys manage to create their own small moments of transcendence. At once wary and full of wonder, Hank and Ralph will win your heart with their outrageous, poignant, and occasionally scary antics - and they will teach you something about the ties that bind us together, hold us back, and redeem us.
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Ralph-Novel-John-McNally/dp/0743257774
2004
(Having written a scathing essay about her disgust with th...)
Having written a scathing essay about her disgust with the government's standardized testing process, Jainey skips her final weeks of high school, while part-time test scorer Charlie reads Jainey's essay and recognizes her as a person needing help.
https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Report-Card-John-McNally/dp/0743256263
2006
(John Belushi, Walter Payton, Richard J. Daley, and Nelson...)
John Belushi, Walter Payton, Richard J. Daley, and Nelson Algren are some of the Chicagoans who inhabit and haunt this new collection of stories from a lauded American writer. In this first story collection since the award-winning Troublemakers, many of the stories deftly resurrect deceased Chicagoans or artifacts of Chicago pop culture, creating an impressionistic portrait of the city.
https://www.amazon.com/Ghosts-Chicago-John-McNally/dp/0980016436
2008
(You graduate from the Iowa Writers' Workshop with a short...)
You graduate from the Iowa Writers' Workshop with a short story published in The New Yorker and subsequently Best American Short Stories. You stay in town and work on your novel. And work on your novel. Until, finally, twelve years have passed and you are working as a media escort for author tours and your unfinished novel sits in a box under your bed. Now your girlfriend has left you. Your car is missing a muffler. Your neighbor is walking around naked because his hands are bandaged and he can't unzip his pants. You are at the whims of a slew of increasingly unhinged writers, and when one of them disappears, an insane New York publicist begins stalking you. This is the life of Jack Hercules Sheahan, a character well understood by author John McNally.
https://www.amazon.com/After-Workshop-Memoir-Hercules-Sheahan/dp/158243560X
2010
(The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unre...)
The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist is a must-read for creative-writing students and teachers, conference participants, and aspiring writers of every stamp. Directed primarily at fiction writers but suitable for writers of all genres, John McNally's guide is a comprehensive, take-no-prisoners blunt, highly idiosyncratic, and delightfully subjective take on the writing life.
https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Writers-Survival-Guide-Unrepentant/dp/1587299208
2010
(Taking off from The Creative Writer's Survival Guide, Joh...)
Taking off from The Creative Writer's Survival Guide, John McNally's relentlessly blunt, bracingly cheerful, and immensely helpful map to being a writer, Vivid and Continuous is an equally blunt, cheerful, and helpful map to learning to be a writer. While acknowledging that many fine books cover such essentials of fiction writing as a point of view, characterization, and setting, McNally sets out in this new book - intended as a supplement to beginning fiction-writing classes or as the sole text for upper-level or graduate courses - to solve the tricky second-tier problems that those books cover only in footnotes.
https://www.amazon.com/Vivid-Continuous-Exercises-Writing-Fiction-ebook/dp/B00B2K4DT6
2013
(Two boys, Hank and Ralph, create moments of outrageous tr...)
Two boys, Hank and Ralph, create moments of outrageous transcendence in this comic novel about adolescence in the 1970s - a time, like today when adults couldn't be trusted and just getting by was hard work. Amid the clatter of Cheap Trick and Styx, CB radios, and Creature Features, this novel belts out timeless truths about boyhood, friendship, and redemption.
https://www.amazon.com/Lord-Ralphs-John-McNally/dp/1938126319
2015
(In his first memoir, John gives readers an honest and oft...)
In his first memoir, John gives readers an honest and often mischievous look at his working-class childhood in Midwestern America. This intimate, biting look into John's transient family takes readers through two states, five grade schools, 210 pounds, and a lifetime of insecurity. Like Dickens's David Copperfield, he hopes to be the hero of his own story, but unlike David Copperfield, he is a fat boy who breaks kids' noses in karate and has fantasies of living in a nudist camp with his kindergarten teacher. He saves his family at age four but unwittingly commits a felony at age eight.
https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Really-Wanted-Have/dp/0996864954
2017
(The Promise of Failure is part memoir of the writing life...)
The Promise of Failure is part memoir of the writing life, part advice book, and part craft book, sometimes funny, sometimes wrenching, but always honest. McNally uses his own life as a blueprint for the writer's daily struggles as well as the existential ones, tackling subjects such as when to quit and when to keep going, how to deal with depression, what risking something of yourself means, and ways to reenergize your writing through reinvention.Â
https://www.amazon.com/Promise-Failure-Writers-Perspective-Succeeding/dp/1609385756
2018
(A magician shows up unexpectedly at a grade school. Retir...)
A magician shows up unexpectedly at a grade school. Retirees answer phone calls from lonely children. Asleep study assistant speaks to a patient about his own afterlife experiences. Twenty years ago, Richard Russo wrote of Troublemakers, John McNally is an electrifying writer whose stories burrow under the skin. His world becomes our world, his way of seeing, ours. Resistance is futile. The same is true of these nine stories that are by turns fantastical, hilarious, and heartbreaking.
https://www.amazon.com/Fear-Everything-John-McNally/dp/1946160636
2020
John Raymond McNally was born on November 8, 1965, in Oak Lawn, Illinois, United States. He is the son of Robert and Margie (Triplett) McNally.
John McNally is a graduate of the class of 1983 of Reavis High School. Then he began his studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1987. In 1989 he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Iowa. In ten years, he got a Doctor of Philosophy degree in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
John McNally, after receiving his doctoral degree, began his teaching career in 2000 as a visiting assistant professor at the University of South Florida. In 2001 he went to the George Washington University as a visiting writer where he worked till 2002, the year he became an assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University. In 2013 he joined the University of Louisiana at Lafayette as a writer-in-residence and professor of English.
Over the years, McNally has been engaged in writing and editing books. In High Infidelity: Twenty-Four Great Short Stories About Adultery by Some of Our Best Contemporary Authors (1997), McNally chose stories by well-known authors such as John Updike, Bharati Mukherjee, Margaret Atwood, and T. Coraghessan Boyle, to name just a few, as well as some less-seasoned but talented ones. All the stories are about forbidden relationships. His short story collection Troublemakers (2000) consists of ten short stories and a novella about lower-middle-class men and boys driven to desperate acts usually hilarious, or at least head-scratchingly bizarre. In the collection, The Student Body: Short Stories about College Students and Professors (2001), are stories by a diverse group of authors such as Stephen King, Thisbe Nissen, Marly Swick, and Ron Carlson. The book is divided into two sections, one from the students' perspectives, the other from the educators'.
Humor Me: An Anthology of Humor by Writers of Color (2002) grew from McNally's frustrations while preparing a course on humor in American literature and found almost no representation of minority writers. This representative work encompasses different genres such as poetry, cartoons, drama, and fiction. McNally notes that not all those represented identify themselves as humorists; that race is not the central theme; and that the role of humor is broadly represented, flowing around such universals as ambition, ladder-climbing, and sex.
In his first memoir, The Boy Who Really, Really Wanted to Have Sex: The Memoir of a Fat Kid (2017), the author gives readers an honest and often mischievous look at his working-class childhood in Midwestern America. This intimate, biting look into John's transient family takes readers through two states, five grade schools, 210 pounds, and a lifetime of insecurity.
His other books include The Book of Ralph (2004), America's Report Card (2006), story collection Ghosts of Chicago: Stories (2008), After the Workshop (2010), the young adult novel Lord of the Ralphs (2015), The Promise of Failure: One Writer's Perspective on Not Succeeding (2018). The author also wrote two books for writers, The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist and Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction. The recent book by John McNally is The Fear of Everything: Stories (2020).
He is also known as a contributor of fiction and nonfiction to over a hundred publications, magazines, and anthologies, including North American Review, New England Review, Florida Review, Idaho Review, Punk Planet, Colorado Review, and Columbia.
(Taking off from The Creative Writer's Survival Guide, Joh...)
2013(Having written a scathing essay about her disgust with th...)
2006(Two boys, Hank and Ralph, create moments of outrageous tr...)
2015(The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unre...)
2010(High Infidelity, an anthology of stories that share the c...)
1997(This collection of humorous works by writers of color inc...)
2002(The Promise of Failure is part memoir of the writing life...)
2018(Troublemakers is an often hilarious, sometimes frightenin...)
2000(You graduate from the Iowa Writers' Workshop with a short...)
2010(In his first memoir, John gives readers an honest and oft...)
2017(Fiction, like life, has its lessons, and it's a wild ride...)
2001(A magician shows up unexpectedly at a grade school. Retir...)
2020(John Belushi, Walter Payton, Richard J. Daley, and Nelson...)
2008(All of us need a Ralph in our lives. Chicago, 1978. Hank ...)
2004Quotations: "University campuses, small and large, are treasure-troves of material for fiction writers."
John is married to Amy Knox Brown, a writer.