John McNally

John McNally is author of

AFTER THE WORKSHOP: A NOVEL.

AFTER THE WORKSHOP was released by Counterpoint in February 2010. Read all the press clippings below!!!

Description:

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. 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. Your girlfriend has left you. Your car is missing a muffler. Your neighbor is walking around naked because his hands are too badly frostbitten to unzip his pants. You are at the whims of a slew of increasingly crazy 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. He 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 ease and 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.

Praise for AFTER THE WORKSHOP (Release date: February 2010)

"A media escort in the Midwest’s most literary town spills the beans on the book business. McNally enthusiastically rakes the literary profession over the coals in his cutting fictional biography of Jack Hercules Sheahan, once a wunderkind of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a New Yorker–published writer with great potential and even greater opportunities. The novel smartly picks up Jack’s story a decade after his well has run dry, as he subsists by ushering famous and not-so-famous writers to their hotels, bookstore readings and many, many bars… A ribald deconstruction, packed with literary in-jokes, of an industry in love with its own absurdities." -- Kirkus

“McNally, an Iowa graduate and former media escort, clearly knows the world he admires yet takes down. His wacky literary archetypes, naked humor and sharp observations offer up an entertaining look at the writing life and the people who prop it up.” -- Publishers Weekly

“A swift, wicked, and very funny book about what writers do when they’re not writing. They’re gossiping, scheming, pining, teaching, going on book tours, and—in the case of McNally’s blocked and shopworn hero, Jack—babysitting more famous writers on tour and trying to think of a reason to live. The pace is brisk, the prose is buoyant, the vision clear and sharp, and the outcome unexpectedly moving. A fine novel.” —Kevin Canty, author of Where the Money Went

“John McNally skewers so many sacred cows of the writing and publishing world in After the Workshop that he may need to hire a bodyguard. But beyond the biting humor and literary Schadenfreude is a novel about how hard it is to meet your own great expectations, which McNally renders with humanity and charm and his own trademark dark wit.”—Tod Goldberg, author of Other Resort Cities

“John McNally is a ridiculously funny writer and this is satirical fiction at its very finest—not only does After the Workshop shred the eye-rolling vanities of our day, but it takes care, in the meantime, to smile kindly on what’s good in the world, too.” —Patrick Somerville, author of The Cradle

John McNally is presently living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is the author of three novels and two story collections.