Thomas McNeely, novelist

We first met this episode’s guest at the WriteFest conference at Rice University. We found had all sorts of connections, as writers in this weird industry often do: he grew up in Houston like Kate did, and he has ties to Jessica’s Boston, where he lives and teaches. We are more than happy to showcase his work here on the show. From the gorgeous and yet tangled-up-in-dirt realities of short stories, like his “Sheep” published in the Atlantic, to his novel Ghost Horse, which dissects the irredeemably messed up process of becoming a teenage boy in a broken home beset on all sides by even more broken societal systems—brutality justified by marriage, institutionally-enforced racism, poverty. McNeely adroitly captures the rough edges of these lives we live. You don’t read McNeely so much as read the world, and its rigid systems of belief—how they rub up against, puncture, & punch the soft flesh of its humanity. 

And yet, as we’ll explore on this episode, the stories he tells are not without hope. For the readers who read them; he writes not to condemn us, but to ask us to look deeply, to confront, rectify.

Diversions worth noting and honorable mentions:

• The Novel is Dead: 2014 Edition

• the gut wrenching Joy Williams’ short story, “Escapes”

• Books or a bar of soap? The book in a capitalist society\

• Would James Joyce be good at Twitter?

Other books discussed that blur YA/Adult Lit Fic lines:

• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

• Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

• The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

• Trust Exercise by Susan Choi