Gateway

T. M. McNALLY is the author of five other works of fiction: the novels Until Your Heart Stops, a New York Times Notable Book; Almost Home, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year; and The Goat Bridge, a Booklist Editors' Choice for 2005; and two prize-winning collections, Low Flying Aircraft, a Flannery O'Connor Award winner, and Quick. His stories have appeared in venues such as Conjunctions, DoubleTake, Yale Review, Southwest Review, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Howard Foundation at Brown University, he teaches in the Creative Writing program at Arizona State University.

"Lordy, what a wickedly wise writer T. M. McNally is. The Gateway is a terrific book, impatient and wrought up, a book that goes a long way toward answering this age-old question: Why do fools fall in love? Here are seven answers, each beguiling and break-neck and bedeviling." - Lee K. Abbott "Uncommonly dense, complex, and well-made, these stories are vaultingly ambitious, featuring a wide range of character and milieu. McNally's recurring interests are tricky relationships with fathers, with God; infidelity (on many levels); an obsession with history (especially World War II); generational legacy/burden/shadow. Eliot said, 'But there's no vocabulary/For the love within a family./This love is silent.' The Gateway, in what seems to me a minor miracle, finds the words." - David Shields "McNally is a contemporary American writer in that he is completely unsentimental and accustomed to irony; but he is a rare writer for our times in that his work contains a genuine wistfulness for gentler times, gentler connections between husbands, wives, and children. It is the wistfulness of diminished expectations without a loss of hope." - Tracy Daugherty"