Troublemakers

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

About the Author: John McNally is editor of two fiction anthologies: High Infidelity: 24 Great Stories about Adultery and The Student Body: Short Stories about College Students and Professors. McNally has won a Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing fellowship, a James Michener fellowship, and a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He lives in Iowa City with his wife and their four dogs.

FROM THE CRITICS

Chicago Tribune

The lives McNally depicts are dark, but the situations are consistently hilarious and, at times, filled with a quiet hopefulness.

Madison Magazine

These stories feature laugh-out-loud funny, haunting and a slightly unsound cast of male narrators at the turning points in their rough and tumble lives.

Publishers Weekly

Midwestern pot smokers, petty thieves and bullies-in-training populate this debut collection, but that doesn't prevent McNally from transforming chronicles of their everyday troubles into 11 meaningful, sharply etched stories. Many of the characters are adolescent boys on the edge of discovery of the excitement of sex, the disappointments of adulthood. In "The Vomitorium," the young narrator and his friend Ralph, old enough to be aware of girls but still interested in dressing up for Halloween, grab a ride with an older cousin. The cousin has been stealing from his job--his truck is full of purloined Tootsie Rolls--but behind that goofy crime he hides a more serious misdeed. In "Grand Illusion," the narrator and Ralph are back again, still pruriently interested in their female classmates and now determined to commit some minor crimes of their own. The year is 1979, the bands are Cheap Trick and Styx, but their adolescent cluelessness feels timeless. In "The New Year," drugs and sex appear on the scene (with significant consequences), but for Gary, the main character, the grimmest lesson learned concerns the distance between father and son. In "The First of Your Last Chances," a grown-up version of these misdirected boys is trying to work himself out of trouble with his girlfriend. He learns a surprisingly useful lesson in relating to women from his friend's experience with a personals-ad dominatrix. Of the stories collected here, only "The Politics of Correctness," with its shopworn critique of liberal academia, falls flat. The protagonists of the rest of the tales are vivid though hapless, the adolescents the most heartbreaking in their attempts to not only make trouble, but to make men of themselves. (Oct.) FYI: Troublemakers is this year's winner of the University of Iowa's John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-"It's violent country down here in Southern Illinois," a character in one of McNally's stories remarks, and "the violence around here has a distinctly weirder edge." A boy and his family watch, helplessly entertained, as their next-door neighbor's wife strands her husband on the roof for hours until he falls off, injured. Another boy's father spontaneously takes out his hurt at his wife's departure on the body of a deer he finds dead in the road. A desperate man quietly saws his kitchen table into 42 pieces. A na ve boy on an errand learns the hard way that he's delivering hush money to a battered woman from the man who beat her. Winner of the John Simmons Award for Short Fiction, Troublemakers is a fantastic debut. The author has an exquisite feel for simple, everyday aches, the heartbreaking common cruelties that people swallow, dazed, barely missing a beat. As McNally's narrators-mostly uneasy sidekicks to the "troublemakers" of the title-bear witness to and absorb the shock of neighborhood events, readers are left a bit breathless and feel as though they are right there.-Emily Lloyd, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

John McNally has that rare gift of achieving both humor and poignancy, and his ability to evoke the personal past in all its delicious detail makes one think of an American Roddy Doyle. — (T. Coraghessan Boyle, author of T. C. Boyle Stories)

Troublemakers is, on every page, in every sentence, simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny and absolutely heartbreaking. John McNally's work will remind you of the greatest stories you ever heard from your best friend, or your long-lost cousin, or the improbable barroom genius you end up next to at the end of the night, except they're even better: vivid and moving and eloquent and full of the kind of moral weight that reminds you what stories are for. He has things to tell, and he does so, beautifully.  — Elizabeth McCracken

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. — (Richard Russo, author of Straight Man)