Share <Embed>

List Price: $29.00

Save: $18.50 (64%)

+ $3.99 shipping

Arrives: Feb 4 - 9

Fastest delivery: Thursday, Jan 21

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
As an alternative, the Kindle eBook is available now and can be read on any device with the free Kindle app.

Secure transaction

Ships from	focus31
Sold by	focus31

Details

Ships from

focus31

Sold by

focus31

& FREE Shipping

Used: Like New | Details

Sold by WonderBook

Other Sellers on Amazon

$29.00
& FREE Shipping on eligible orders. Details

Sold by: Amazon.com

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 2 images

Quick: Stories (Michigan Literary Fiction Awards) Hardcover – September 3, 2004

by Mr. T.M. McNally (Author)

3 ratings

See all formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$17.99

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$10.50

$4.57

Praise for Quick:

"T.M. McNally's stories are compact, complex, artful and truthful miracles of humanity and language-strong coffee for these narcoleptic times."
-Pam Houston, author of Waltzing the Cat

"Like good blues, these stories don't strain but seem to erupt from the heart, organic as blood."
-Ann Cummins, author of Red Ant House

"Quick is as bold as it is breakneck, part battle and part sermon, fiction meant for high ground and high heaven."
-Lee K. Abbott, author of Wet Places at Noon

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.

Special offers and product promotions

Amazon Business : For business-only pricing, quantity discounts and FREE Shipping. Register a free business account

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Even though most of his new stories are set in wide-open, sun-beamed Arizona, there doesn't seem to be enough light or oxygen in McNally's fictional universe. It's stiflingly hot outside and freezing inside, and his narrators, tense and intense characters who are weathering the worst that seemingly ordinary lives have to offer, are short of breath, confiding their wrenching stories as quickly as possible to try to ameliorate the pain. But the very fact that they're talking is indicative of their bid for survival, and for all their drastic woes--and McNally does concoct excruciating predicaments involving suicide, cancer, madness, incest, addiction, betrayals, appalling accidents, and vicious violence-- these astutely crafted tales are spiked with lancing one-liners and sanguine irony that balance grimness with humor, absurdity with concisely phrased yet deeply resonant truths. The author of three previous, equally bracing works, including Almost Home (1998), McNally remains sharply attuned to the resiliency of young people dealt a lousy hand, but here he also offers galvanizing studies in jeopardized marriages, including the complexly beautiful "To Comfort." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"Quick is as bold as it is breakneck, part battle and part sermon, fiction meant for high ground and high heaven."
—Lee K. Abbott, author of Wet Places at Noon

-- Lee K. Abbott Published On: 2004-09-13

"T. M. McNally's stories are compact, complex, artful and truthful miracles of humanity and language—strong coffee for these narcoleptic times."
—Pam Houston, author of Waltzing the Cat

-- Pam Houston, author of Waltzing the Cat Published On: 2004-06-18

Publisher : University of Michigan Press (September 3, 2004)
Language: : English
Hardcover : 216 pages
ISBN-10 : 0472114522
ISBN-13 : 978-0472114528
Item Weight : 1.01 pounds
Dimensions : 6 x 1 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #5,313,156 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #74,823 in Short Stories (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3 ratings

Start reading Quick: Stories (Michigan Literary Fiction Awards) on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Compra tu Kindle aquí, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Customer reviews

5 star		100%
4 star 0% (0%)		0%
3 star 0% (0%)		0%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Live Simply

Definitely read this book. In pieces.

Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2014

Verified Purchase

Once again -- brutal fiction with dirty hands. But you can't wash this dirt off because it is really who we are. Oddly, the first story which the author seems to be especially fond of (and I speak of someone who knows this particular milieu well) is just all wrong. But what a shining shot of fluid, mean, long-lasting prose. This book will not leave you soon. You will keep finding it again in your mind.

Helpful

The Quick And The Dead

Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2005

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.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Katrina Denza

Fabulous Collection!

Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2005

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.

Helpful