Famous Children
If you want to know how we live now, read this book. McManus is our Salinger.
Fox Tooth Heart
McManus burrows deep under the skins of his rough, cast-out characters and emerges with stories that are bold and ingenious.
Achingly visceral... a masterpiece.
This is McManus's genius: depravity, tender and effortless.
John McManus writes like the love child of Denis Johnson and Joy Williams.... For those wearied by predictable fiction, Fox Tooth Heart is manna from someplace more interesting and sorrowful than heaven.
Bitter Milk
Reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's The Orchard Keeper in its precociousness.
Bold in conception and shrewdly deployed, the voice that first-time novelist John McManus has invented for Bitter Milk is inspired.... Bitter Milk is an outstanding novel.
The narrative moves toward a kind of liberation.... The result is a densely atmospheric, propulsive tale.
Born on a Train
The stories in John McManus's Born on a Train are powered by radiant prose.
John McManus' nervewracking prose has great pitch and daring, and "Eastbound" has to be one of the best, most mournful end-of-the-road stories ever written. He's a wildly talented writer.
A dozen pitch-perfect tales... all packed with yearning, dark humor, and a gorgeous poetry of love and loss.
Stop Breakin Down
A phenomenal talent blazing up suddenly on the horizon... precise, brilliant language that evokes without ever having to explain.
Here is rage on the page.... It's a whole environment, with a new food chain, and yes, I want to know about it.
McManus straps his characters into a screaming, circular drop toward nothingness in what seems like one long, breathless take.