Having written a scathing essay about her disgust with the government's standardized testing process, Jainey skips her final weeks of high school, while part-time test scorer Charlie reads Jainey's essay and recognizes her as a person needing help.

The Promise of Failure is part memoir of the writing life, part advice book, and part craft book; sometimes funny, sometimes wrenching, but always honest. McNally uses his own life as a blueprint for the writer’s daily struggles as well as the existential ones, tackling subjects such as when to quit and when to keep going, how to deal with depression, what risking something of yourself means, and ways to reenergize your writing through reinvention. What McNally illuminates is how rejection, in its best light, is another element of craft, a necessary stage to move the writer from one project to the next, and that it’s best to see rejection and failure on a life-long continuum so that you can see the interconnectedness between failure and success, rather than focusing on failure as a measure of self-worth. As brutally candid as McNally can sometimes be, The Promise of Failure is ultimately an inspiring book—never in a Pollyannaish self-help way. McNally approaches the reader as a sympathetic companion with cautionary tales to tell. Written by an author who has as many unpublished books under his belt as published ones, The Promise of Failure is as much for the newcomer as it is for the established writer.

All of us need a Ralph in our lives. Chicago, 1978. Hank Boyd, a solid B+ student, a good kid, wants eighth grade to be his special year. But when Ralph, an oddball troublemaker who ' s been held back twice, gets the idea that he and Hank are pals, Hank's year devolves into an odyssey as frightening as it is hilarious. John McNally, acclaimed author of Troublemakers, deftly portrays the astonishing, sometimes terrifying world of adolescence in 1970s America: The adult world becomes increasingly untrustworthy, the economy plummets, and families seem to be falling apart, yet the two boys manage to create their own small moments of transcendence. At once wary and full of wonder, Hank and Ralph will win your heart with their outrageous, poignant, and occasionally scary antics -- and they will teach you something about the ties that bind us together, hold us back, and redeem us.

Life is hard for a literary wunderkind after a decade of writer’s block in this “ribald deconstruction . . . of an industry in love with its own absurdities” (Kirkus Reviews). 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. Now 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 unhinged 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. McNally 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 wry 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.

"I write this blurb in distress because for years I've been stealing John McNally's sharp insights into writing and publishing and passing them off as my own. Now this generous so-and-so is sharing his vast experience as a writer and editor with everyone. Worse yet, this book, despite its instructional value, is irresistibly, un-put-downably readable."---Timothy Schaffert, author, Devils in the Sugar Shop --

In the seventeen vividly rendered stories in Ghosts of Chicago, John McNally captures the poignancy of both the shared experiences of a city and the interior details of his everyday characters.

Stories express the everyday aches and common cruelties of life that people endure and witness, from a wife stranding her husband on a roof, to a man sawing his kitchen into little pieces, to a man taking out his anger on a dead deer.

Sailors Diggings an isolated mining settlement is left reeling when outlaws slaughter seventeen of the stunned population and clean out the assay office stealing $75,000 worth of freshly mined gold. A group of vigilantes led by Don Plunkett give chase determined to dispense some Old West justice. Eddie Carter is mistaken for a gang member and to escape a lynching he must go on the run handcuffed to outlaw leader Dave Mooney, the man responsible for the death of his partner. In the confrontation that follows, the stolen gold disappears with an outcome that nobody could have anticipated.

Sam Heggarty returns home to hunt for the gunmen who robbed and executed his father. As he makes his way back, he witnesses another murder and stumbles across a clue to the people responsible for his father's death. Sam becomes caught up in the chase to track down an escaped prisoner as he partners up with ageing lawman, County Sheriff Lewis Leeming. He discovers that the one person who may hold the key to the identity of his father's murderers is someone that everyone else is intent on killing. Heggarty will have to save the life of a man involved in his father's death.

Get shrunk! Humour and high-stakes combine in the conclusion to the action-packed Infinity Drake series. A BIG adventure with a tiny hero!