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. 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 nave 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, Inc. “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 “I love Troublemakers. With a palpable reality breathing from every page, this book has tough people in tough spots. John McNally's writing is so good that the characters won't leave you alone, but will stay in your mind for days. Read these stories and you are entering the world of a brilliant writer.” —Chris Offutt, author of Kentucky Straight “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 John McNally is the author of three novels, After the Workshop , The Book of Ralph , and America’s Report Card , and two story collections, Troublemakers (Iowa, 2000) and Ghosts of Chicago . He has edited six anthologies, including When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School and Humor Me: An Anthology of Humor by Writers of Color (Iowa, 2002). His fiction, book reviews, and essays have appeared in more than a hundred publications, including the Washington Post , the Sun , and Open City , and he is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review . A native of Chicago’s southwest side, he is an associate professor of English at Wake Forest University. Used Book in Good Condition