Books by John McNally

America's Report Card: A Novel

by John McNally

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.

America's Report Card: A Novel

by John McNally

America's Report Card offers a brilliant vision of contemporary American life that is frightening, darkly hilarious, and tinged with satire. John McNally tells the story of two unlucky people who forge an improbable yet possibly life-saving connection in a world overshadowed by the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind -- a world in which hulking government bureaucracies and vast corporations join forces to numb the populace into apathy with various standardization and surveillance programs. But McNally sees hope in the daily experiences of his characters: sometimes, haphazardly, by going about their own very particular lives, people circumvent the official program and begin to actively claim lives of freedom and dignity. America's Report Card is an arresting and humane portrait of life taking place in the margins, outside the stunted imagination of government and media.

As in his critically acclaimed novel The Book of Ralph, McNally dazzles with characters like Jainey O'Sullivan -- a lonely, confused, purple-and-green-haired sometime truant, Jainey cares so little about high school that on her final standardized test, she writes an essay heaping scorn on the test administrators even as she asks her faceless reader for help. Charlie Wolf leads a fairy-tale graduate student life, with just enough money and clout to keep him in books, vodka, a threadbare apartment, and a beautiful, intellectual girlfriend. But the bohemian dream starts to crumble when Charlie takes a job scoring standardized tests and finds himself surrounded by people who are either plodding blindly along or caught up in wild conspiracy theories. When Charlie and Jainey stumble upon one another, they also stumble upon their own bravery and compassion. They try to protect each other from their habitual bad luck and the shadowy threats lurking at the edges of their lives, and what ensues doesn't follow any prescribed course.

The official version of American life today may get the broad strokes and primary colors right, but America's Report Card reveals how the government and the media overlook the corners and shadows where our individual realities unfold all too often in chaotic, precarious, and bewildering ways. This wholly original, wildly entertaining novel mirrors our part in the dark but frequently redemptive comedy that is life.

The Book of Ralph: A Novel

by John McNally

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, acclaimed author of Troublemakers, 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.

Troublemakers

by John McNally

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: a high school boy with a new driver's license picks his brother up from jail; a UPS driver suspects his wife of having an affair but cannot find any tangible evidence of her indiscretion; an unemployed man's life begins to unravel after he discovers a dead man in a tree in his own backyard; two boys spend Halloween with an older thug; a young college teacher's patience is tested by both his annoying colleagues and the criminals who haunt his neighborhood. In story after story, McNally's troublemakers lead readers to a place no less thrilling or dangerous than the human heart itself.

Ghosts of Chicago

by John McNally

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. Gene Siskel, impatient with the movie he’s watching, taunts Roger Ebert; Miss Betsy, the host of Romper Room, experiences her own awakening during the sexual revolution; railroad mogul George Pullman remembers his greatest triumph as he draws his last breath. Other stories tell of everyday people who must confront their own private ghosts—an accountant who falls in love with a woman who is in love with a man on death row; a boy whose fascination with movie monsters grows stronger as his mother’s pregnancy comes to term; a memoirist whose dark night of the soul leads him on a journey from which he may not return. Praised by writers as diverse as Richard Russo, Irvine Welsh, Elizabeth McCracken, T. C. Boyle, and Mitch Albom, John McNally is a voice to be savored.

When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School

by John McNally

For Anyone Who's Ever Been a Teenager

Who's teenage years weren't terrible? Remember the scary older kids? The sadistic gym teacher? The smelly kid who sat next to you in science class? Your first fumbling kiss? That time you threw up in the cafeteria? Your first attempt at putting on a condom? The period that arrived unexpectedly? That awful fight with your parents? The first time you got drunk? That note you wrote that you shouldn't have written? The day you forgot to zip your fly? That monster zit? When, you wondered, would it all end?

In When I Was a Loser, John McNally, author of the novel America's Report Card, assembles twenty-five original essays--often hilarious, sometimes tenderhearted, always evocative--about defining moments of high school loserdom. Brad Land, Julianna Baggott, Owen King, Johanna Edwards, and many more fresh, talented writers explore their own angst, humiliation, heartache, and other staples of teen life.

These essays perfectly capture what it was like to be in high school: to experience so many things for the first time, to assert independence while desperately trying to fit in, to feel misunderstood and unable to articulate the wild swings between heartbreak, anger, and euphoria. One writer recalls how his grandmother helped him with his home perm in preparation for the Senior Class picture; another recounts her discovery, sometime after hitting puberty, of the power she held over boys and men, while at the same time she felt herself at their mercy; a third remembers the casual cruelties visited on him by the cooler kids, and the cruelties he, in turn, inflicted on kids below him on the social ladder.

Utterly candid and compulsively readable, these essays conjure up and untangle those raw and formative years. The writers cringe and laugh at the teenagers they were, but at the same time, they honor their adolescence and the way it shaped their lives. Because, in truth, beneath the layers of adult respectability, we all still carry a little bit of our teenage selves around with us.

Who Can Save Us Now?: Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories

by Owen King, John McNally

Edited and with contributions by Owen King (We're All in This Together) and John McNally (America's Report Card this anthology enriches the superhero canon immeasurably.

Twenty-two of today's most talented writers (and comics fans) unite in Who Can Save Us Now?, an anthology featuring brand-new superheroes equipped for the threats and challenges of the twenty-first century -- with a few supervillains thrown in for good measure. With mutations stranger than the X-Men and with even more baggage than the Hulk, this next generation of superheroes is a far cry from your run-of-the-mill caped crusader.

From the image-conscious and not-very-mysterious masked meathead who swoops in and sweeps the tough girl reporter off her feet; to the Meerkat, who overcomes his species' cute and cuddly image to become the resident hero in a small Midwestern city; to the Silverfish, "the creepy superhero," who fights crime while maintaining the slipperiest of identities; to Manna Man, who manipulates the minds of televangelists to serve his own righteous mission, these protectors (and in some cases antagonizers) of the innocent and the virtuous will delight literary enthusiasts and comic fans alike.

With stunning illustrations by artist Chris Burnham, Who Can Save Us Now? offers a vibrant, funny, and truly unusual array of characters and their stories.

After the Workshop: A Novel

by John McNally

Life is hard for a literary wunderkind after a decade of writer’s block in this “ribald deconstruction . . . of an industry in love with its own absurdities” (Kirkus Reviews).
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. McNally is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as well as a former media escort, and these misadventures are brought to life by his very own.
Recalling the wry humor of novels by Nick Hornby and Michael Chabon, After the Workshop tells the satirical story of a writer who confronts the demons from his past while escorting those of his present.

Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction

by John McNally

Taking off from The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide, John McNally’srelentlessly blunt, bracingly cheerful, and immensely helpful map to being a writer, Vivid and Continuousis 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 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.
Vivid and Continuous takes its inspiration from John Gardner, whose essential truths in On Becoming a Novelist clarified McNally’s goal of communicating a “vivid and continuous dream” with his own writing. In fifteen concise, energizing chapters, he dispenses advice gained from almost thirty years of studying, writing, and teaching. How do you avoid the pitfalls inherent in the most common subjects for stories? How do you create memorable minor characters? What about managing references to pop culture without distracting your readers, revising a story to bring its subtext into focus, or exploring the twenty most common craft-related quirks that lessen immediacy for your readers? How do you keep from overdosing on similes and metaphors or relying on too many flashbacks to provide necessary backstory? How do you learn to listen when your story tries to talk to you? Finally, how can you resist “John McNally’s Sure-Fire Formula for Becoming Funnier in 30 Days”?
McNally cites many novels and short stories as examples that best illustrate the lessons he wants to impart, the writer’s life, or the writer’s craft, as well as his own favorite authors’ novels and short story collections. Exercises at the end of each chapter reinforce its point and serve as practical catalysts for new writings and directions. Just blunt enough to get your attention but not blunt enough to crush you, challenging but not discouraging, personal but not ego-ridden, snarky but not mean, John McNally will prompt you to think more deeply about a variety of issues that will push you toward writing more meaningful, more accomplished work.

Lord of the Ralphs

by John McNally

"I knew kids like Ralph—and they scared me—but none of them had his heart, his humor, or ultimately his entertaining story."—Mitch Albom
"McNally's writing is so compelling, not to mention funny, that you're often surprised by sudden, more tender moments."—Sarah Dessen
"A serious joy."—Richard Russo
Every school year was a chance to start all over again, and so while the first seven months of 1978 had sucked, I had high hopes that August would be the beginning of the year not sucking. And because it would be my last year of grade school, I had secretly hoped that eighth grade would be different somehow, that a cute girl from another state would transfer to my school and fall insanely in love with me . . .
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. Lord of the Ralphs is a reincarnation of the author's beloved novel for adults, The Book of Ralph, revised and expanded specifically for YA readers.
John McNally is the author of three novels, two short story collections, and two books about writing. He is professor and writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Ghosts of Chicago Stories

by John McNally

Chicago is famously a "city of neighborhoods" that somehow balances metropolitan and parochial life. In the seventeen vividly rendered stories in Ghosts of Chicago, John McNally likewise captures the poignancy of both the shared experiences of a city and the interior details of his everyday characters.While McNally resurrects Chicago icons and institutions—including John Belushi, Walter Payton, and Richard J. Daley make appearances, and WGN’s "Creature Features" and a morning show for children featuring a silent goose are settings-- he is ultimately interested in the human condition, whether it’s railroad mogul George Pullman remembering his greatest triumph or the host of Romper Room experiencing her own awakening during the sexual revolution.Other stories tell of everyday people who must confront their own private ghosts—an accountant who falls in love with a woman who is in love with a man on death row; the son of a realtor who discovers his father’s secret life; a memoirist whose dark night of the soul leads him on a journey from which he may never return.McNally may be writing about Chicago—in the words of a Chicago Sun-Times reviewer, "He may have physically left Chicago, but the city has never left him"—but like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, the stories in this book transcend place.

The Promise of Failure One Writer's Perspective on Not Succeeding

by John McNally

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.

What McNally illuminates is how rejection, in its best light, is another element of craft, a necessary stage to move the writer from one project to the next, and that it’s best to see rejection and failure on a life-long continuum so that you can see the interconnectedness between failure and success, rather than focusing on failure as a measure of self-worth. As brutally candid as McNally can sometimes be, The Promise of Failure is ultimately an inspiring book—never in a Pollyannaish self-help way. McNally approaches the reader as a sympathetic companion with cautionary tales to tell. Written by an author who has as many unpublished books under his belt as published ones, The Promise of Failure is as much for the newcomer as it is for the established writer.