Quick

By T.M. McNally

From the author of Until Your Heart Stops and Almost Home, Quick is T. M. McNally's collection of powerful and starkly honest stories of American life.

The stories in Quick are complex, sometimes harsh, yet always unafraid of the dark truths many of the characters are forced to confront. Dense and layered, these miniature and compact sagas endow their often damaged characters with uncommon brilliance. Themes of love, loss, addiction, and courage roam freely throughout, and the author sets an unforgettable and palpable tone that is exceedingly spare yet faceted with views of the richness beneath the surface of everyday life.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472114522
• ISBN13: 9780472114528
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 202 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

The Quick And The Dead

T. M. McNally is a wildly talented writer from Arizona of whom I had never heard till a friend urged me to read his collection, QUICK. "This is just the sort of book you should be reading," she said. "And writing." When she had gone I opened it up and plunged right in, as if to the bottom of one of the Tempe swimming pools McNally specializes in. My friend was correct. This writing is intense, with sordid encounters and strange, almost surreal things happening to his leading characters as a matter of course. I thought things were crazy here in SF, but the "Copper State" has us beat by a country mile. In "Insomnia" a man wonders if his wife is having some kind of affair with their pool boy. He switches addictions, from cigarettes to booze, and takes a second honeymoon trip to St. Louis to celebrate. The vertiginous span of the Arch is perfect McNally material, and he makes the most of it. "The Last Year of the Soapbox" is a sad tale of a boy teased in school, pissed on in the showers and the target end of many a snapped jock. When he asks his father to help him defend himself he uncovers his dad's bruised, stoic masculinity, and he grows up with a certain wariness about his body which leads him to wear underwear in the jacuzzi and three condoms at the same time. Tellingly, he becomes an ace race driver, counting on speed to help him make the escape his father never could. Other stories tell equally heartbreaking tales of American life, often with women's lives, an arena in which he seems only slightly less familiar. I sort of figured out how to write one of McNally's short stories. You divide your material into a series of two page "scenes." Half of these will take place in the past, the other half in the present tense. You can jumble them up if you like. Half of the scenes will begin with a proverb-like general statement that has something a little askew to it, like "Tragedy is what happens when you don't think anything will." The other half will be direct, first person, and often from somewhere deep in the narrator's past, such as, "Of course no one had ever touched my balls." Separate these scenes with some cryptic asterisks-in this case, three or four black squares. All your narrators use them. Add in some hot weather, a saguaro or two, and you're pretty much there.

Fabulous Collection!

In T.M. McNally's "Quick," you will find an array of characters struggling. Whether it's with their addictions, their propensity toward violence, their immortality, or simply their own pasts, these struggles rise off the page and make themselves known without embarrassment or apology. Complex and richly layered, McNally doesn't shy away from difficult images or emotions. And although at times it seemed to me to be trying too hard, it's easy to see why this collection won the Michigan Literary Fiction Award.