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. 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 bandaged and he can’t 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.
{"itemData":[{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":12.44,"ASIN":"158243560X","isPreorder":0},{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":15.48,"ASIN":"1587299208","isPreorder":0}],"shippingId":"158243560X::YX0%2FVQVZShurGbUWWVtwNjPw3IdtT8QnHJQaj4vYgxAs5BEhNbECvAJ5YboUE2E58p3d9M2uKivsSR2BprHDICJy6rmxbRNDjI5pAu0Ns0P5jTBZuqeEfA%3D%3D,1587299208::F%2FAGEuT7cmAqXxmUd5oxKBzkssGhwN4dXalgmROjSWJa99%2BJFmFW1WEhh9q2nl6LepLDpb89pKj0uNoNzwuAwjz5N6RkKttSxFdbw44oum3blKJC5rqjFw%3D%3D","sprites":{"addToWishlist":["wl_one","wl_two","wl_three"],"addToCart":["s_addToCart","s_addBothToCart","s_add3ToCart"],"preorder":["s_preorderThis","s_preorderBoth","s_preorderAll3"]},"currenyCode":"USD","shippingDetails":{"xy":"same"},"tags":["x","y","z"],"strings":{"addToWishlist":["add to wishlist","Add both to Wish List","Add all three to Wish List"],"addToCart":["Add to Cart","Add both to Cart","Add all three to Cart"],"showDetailsDefault":"Show availability and shipping details","shippingError":"An error occurred, please try again","hideDetailsDefault":"Hide availability and shipping details","priceLabel":["Price:","Price for both:","Price for all three:"],"preorder":["Pre-order this item","Pre-order both items","Pre-order all three items"]}}
In his latest shrewd and compassionate satire, McNally draws on his stint at the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his work as an author escort, discerning in the dreams and absurdity of the literary world all the bittersweet vagaries of the human condition. Consequently, the tale of Jack Hercules Sheahan and his impossible labors is rife with Pyrrhic triumph and hubristic defeat. Jack was an Iowa workshop star after he had a story published in the New Yorker, but 12 years later, he’s alone; his unfinished novel is gathering dust, and his spirit is crushed by the egomaniac visiting writers he drives around town. A barfly and a doofus, he’s ripe for catastrophe, and it swoops in like a slicing winter wind off the prairie with the simultaneous arrival of two authors from hell: an insufferable New York hipster and a memoirist fleeing a James Frey–like scandal. Spiked with hilarious digs at the entire literary egofest, yet rooted in a great love for the necessary magic of stories, McNally’s irresistible novel of the search for authenticity and meaning offers high comedic catharsis. --Donna Seaman
John McNally is the author of three novels, After the Workshop, America's Report Card, and The Book of Ralph; and two story collections, Ghosts of Chicago and Troublemakers. He is also author Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction (forthcoming, 2013) and The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist. He has edited six anthologies, including Who Can Save Us Now: Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories (co-edited with Owen King). John's short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in over ninety magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, including Virginia Quarterly Review, Washington Post, The Sun, Open City, Chicago Tribune, New Sudden Fiction (Norton), and Long Story Short (University of North Carolina Press). His work has appeared in the textbooks Winding Roads: Exercises in Writing Creative Nonfiction and Behind the Short Story: From First Draft to Final Draft, both published by Longman. John has been the recipient of numerous awards for his writing, including a Chesterfield Writer's Film Project for screenwriting (sponsored by Paramount Pictures), the Jenny McKean Moore fellowship for fiction (sponsored by George Washington University), and the Carl Djerassi fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin. His short stories have been cited three times as an outstanding story of the year in the Best American Short Stories series (1991, 2007, and 2008). John has taught creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Western State College of Colorado, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of South Florida at Tampa, George Washington University, and Columbia College Chicago. He has given over a hundred readings all across the country, from New York City to Honolulu, from Bellingham, Washington, to Sanibel Island, Florida. A native of Chicago's southwest side, he is at present an associate professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
I was wary of this book. "After the Workshop" by John McNally orbits around the Iowa Writer's Workshop, an elite program that the author attended himself. Ho Hum. However, John McNally has a keen sense of his audience, and while I'm sure there is plenty that passed straight over my nonliterary head, there was ample humor for the likes of me. This is my favorite of McNally's books, and I've read them all.
"After the Workshop" is a farce that taps into the idiosyncrasies of mankind. It is set in the frigid Iowan winter. Protagonist and literary escort Jack Hercules Sheahan, who has been stalled for years in the middle of his first novel, loses one of the authors he's supposed to be guiding. As events unfold, he reaches a pivotal moment in his life when characters from the past revisit. That's as much as I want to say. I recommend the book.
John McNally's 'After The Workshop' reminds me what I love about good books -- being delivered to a a unique place and time that is full of characters I want to follow. It helps that John consistently writes wonderful first-person narratives; his voice and style are worth stealing at gun point.
'After The Workshop' brought me real reading joy. I can't remember the last time I read for a couple of hours at a time. John's pacing is superb.
I can't wait until the teenagers and my wife read 'After The Workshop,' so we can share lines and situations and the characters. These are characters that will stay with me for quite awhile.
Finally, as expected of John's writing, there are laughs. Sure, there are smirks and smiles, but John had me laughing out loud.
I just finished devouring John McNally's latest novel, After the Workshop. I've got an MFA of my own from a creative writing workshop--though not Iowa.
After the Workshop is a gorgeously rendered novel about a stalled writer, Jack Hercules Sheehan, who takes a gig as a media escort, carting writers from the airport to book signings in his mufflerless car, his unfinished manuscript taunting him from under a pile of phone books. McNally manages to juggle the hysterical (the scene where he writes a check for a breast pump is laugh-out-loud funny, the voicemails on his answering machine because he refuses to buy a cell phone) and the touching (his own self-loathingmanuscript at the bottom of the phone booths, his run-ins with Alice, his ex-fiance).
McNally's one of those writers who should be hugely famous--you can't go wrong with any of his work. His story collections Troublemakers and Ghosts of Chicago are two of my favorites, but he's raised the bar with After the Workshop. It's a stunning narrative that lets you lose track of time, the rare book that says to you, "Just one more chapter." Over and over and over again, until you finish the novel in two or three sittings. After my own post-MFA Sheehan-like slump, McNally's got me itching to sit down at the keyboard again. Start fresh. And it's a rare book that inspires art through its own sheer artistry.
