John McNally

The Hunter, The Man With the Getaway Face, and The Outfit, by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake). Chicago, September 2008. $14 paper each When Donald E. Westlake died on New Year’s Eve, he took a crowd of good men down with him. There were at le [...]

(Romper Room—Chicago, 1954–1975) It’s December 1967: the summer of love is over. Miss Betsy saw footage of it on the evening news—long-haired California boys and girls, naked or nearly naked, smoking grass and wearing pounds of beads. B [...]

  Jimmy Delaney saw kids every day, but there was something about this particular one that bugged the hell out of him. The kid looked short for his age, fragile, and you could see his pink skull through his greasy yellow hair. It was a delicate [...]

In April of 1971, my parents sat me down at the dining room table and delivered the horrifying news: I would no longer be the only child in the family. I said nothing. Rain pounded our windows, and our lights blinked off and on. When lightning zappe [...]

John McNally was born in 1965. After attending a famous writers' workshop in the Midwest, he worked as a short-order cook, bouncer, grave digger, lumberjack, carnival barker, florist, disc jockey, and busboy. Most recently, he was employed as a groun [...]

John McNally is author of The Book of Ralph, published in March of 2004 by Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster. His previous collection, Troublemakers (Iowa, 2000), won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award (2000) and the Nebraska Book Award [...]