Events

Author John McNally will read from his new release, The Fear of Everything: Stories

Moderated by Ted Genoways

Signed copies available for purchase HERE!

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In these nine new short stories, John McNally’s work takes a fantastical turn, where magicians show up unexpectedly at schools, prisoners answer phone calls from lonely children, and sleep study assistants speak to patients about their afterlife experiences. As with McNally’s two previous collections, the award-winning Troublemakers and best-selling Ghosts of Chicago, the stories in The Fear of Everything balance humor with poignancy, but McNally stakes out new territories of darkness and absurdity. These stories are of men, women, and children, often lonely, reaching out for a connection, whether it’s to prospective lovers using online dating sites or to one’s younger self via bygone technology. In the historical story “The Devil in the Details,” a little girl’s fate is cemented early on by gossip and happenstance; in “The Attorney,” a sinister lawyer weaves a tale that plays loose with cause-and-effect. Richard Russo wrote of Troublemakers, “John McNally is an electrifying writer whose stories burrow under the skin. His world becomes out world, his way of seeing, ours. Resistance is futile.” Twenty years later, the same is true for The Fear of Everything.

About the author:

John McNally is the author or editor of seventeen books, including the novel The Book of Ralph and, more recently, The Promise of Failure: One Writer’s Perspective on Not Succeeding. His stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in over a hundred publications, including Virginia Quarterly Review, the Sun, and the Washington Post. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award and the recipient of writing fellowships from Paramount Pictures, the University of Iowa, George Washington University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison . As a screenwriter, he had a feature screenplay in development with the producer of Winter’s Bone; he co-wrote a TV pilot with the creator of True Detective; and last year he was commissioned to write several screenplays for the Norwegian film company Evil Doghouse, which took him to Norway’s Arctic Circle last July. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received his MFA, and the University of Nebraska, where he earned his Ph.D., John is a Chicago-area native. A first-generation college student, he is now the Writer-in-Residence and the Dr. Doris Meriwether/BORSF Professor in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Topic: Virtual Author Event – John McNally with Ted Genoways
Time: Oct 7, 2020 05:30 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

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