From babysitter to bus ticket salesman, construction worker to cult leader, the residents of New Hope chase their dreams and suffer their disappointments against the subtle backdrop of a Midwestern landscape. In the manner of the Pulitzer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge, and the iconic Winesburg, Ohio, Patricia Ann McNair’s story collection The Temple of Air links the lives and stories of a place and its people through tragedy and consequence, blind faith and redemption. Unapologetically in your face, these tales dig into your subconscious and leave you haunted.
“McNair’s plainspoken yet imaginative, complexly unnerving, and haunting stories raise essential questions of fate and will, appearances and truth, guilt and compassion.” —Booklist
“…violently creative…” —Chicago Sun-Times
“The stories in The Temple of Air are steeped in a particular brand of hospitality and violence. They are definitively Midwestern, navigating deftly between the everyday and the disturbing, the prosaic and the poetic.” —NewCity
“…an immersive read…” Time Out Chicago
“This is a beautiful book, intense and original.” – Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife
“The sheer and compelling energy of Patricia Ann McNair’s prose not only dazzles, but more so, draws the reader into the deep and complex emotional reaches of her irresistible, and compassionately rendered characters.” —Jack Driscoll, Twenty Stories
“These are lyrical stories that sear themselves into the reader’s subconscious, and we are incredibly lucky that Patricia Ann McNair has written them. I can’t wait to read more.” —John McNally, The Fear of Everything
“…these narratives are fierce, fearless, brave, as stylistically pure as Raymond Carver, as hard hitting as Mary Gaitskill, as lyrically impassioned as Stuart Dybek.” —Anne-Marie Oomen, As Long As I Know You: The Mom Book
“The Temple of Air is about the spiritual resilience of endangered children, the survival methods of battered adults, and the presence of grace even in our ruined century.” —David Huddle, The Faulkes Chronicle
“The Temple of Air is a wise and masterful book.” —Dennis McFadden, Jimtown Road
Winner! The Temple of Air chosen as The Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year in Traditional Fiction.
Winner! The Temple of Air chosen as Devil’s Kitchen Reading Awardee in Prose, Southern Illinois University Carbondale Grassroots literary magazine and Devil’s Kitchen Fall Literary Festival 2012.
Winner! The Temple of Air selected as Society of Midland Authors 2012 Finalist Awardee in Adult Fiction.
In Responsible Adults, farms fail, families break apart, and work is hard to come by. The characters in Patricia Ann McNair’s fictional Midwestern towns are fueled by grief and hope, loss and desire. A stepfather attacks a neighbor boy for exposing a shameful secret to his stepdaughter. A pregnant undocumented young woman brings new life to a failing church. A mother uses her reluctant adolescent daughter as a model for her art photography. What happens when responsible adults anything but responsible people? When they are, at best, irresponsible, and at worst, dangerous?
“…edgy, empathically imagined, and strongly crafted…” —Booklist
“These stories peer into the world of humanity with sharp and often devastating preciseness, pulling back the curtain on what it means to care and be cared for.” —Chicago Review of Books
“McNair is also particularly talented at guiding her characters to a moment of self-knowledge that is as likely to redeem them as to frustrate them or crush them.” —Christine Sneed, for The National Book Review
“Responsible Adults is devastating, in the best possible way. McNair guides us through domestic worlds where we might fear to tread alone, revealing truths and exposing worlds peopled with want, kitchens with empty refrigerators and strange men. Children eat grape jelly with a spoon and long for ordinary lives as they negotiate adult problems as best they can. Readers are wiser and more compassionate for knowing these stories.” —Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters
“If justice were served, this collection would stand among the best as reason enough to increase the readership for short fiction. It delivers that kind of punch, compassion, and staying power.”
—Jack Driscoll, Twenty Stories
“There are writers who allow you to keep a safe distance from the lives of their characters. And there are writers like McNair, whose stories fly so low to the truth, you are thankful you can read them safely from 30,000 feet.” —Desiree Cooper, Know the Mother
“In this remarkable collection, McNair hits her writerly stride with a sureness that is nothing less than breathtaking.” —Christine Rice, Swarm Theory
“Responsible Adults is bursting with gorgeous, gutting stories.”—Sahar Mustafah, The Beauty of Your Face
Dancing to the jukebox in dark taverns; saying goodbye to her father on the last morning of his life; having sex in the backseat of a car at a drive-in movie; drinking scotch in Havana and coffee in Paris; making up stories on the run; flirting with boys on summer nights on a Chicago beach; gathering the entirety of her recently deceased brother’s things in two plastic garbage bags—these are just a few of the raw and loving moments that Patricia Ann McNair shares in these essays and riffs. “This is how things become true,” she writes in a piece about her father’s FBI file, “…with each retelling.” And These Are the Good Times are stories McNair tells and retells, the ones in which she hopes to find some truth of her own.
“Short story writer McNair (The Temple of Air, 2011) proves to be an irresistible personal essayist of refreshing candor, vibrant openheartedness, rueful humor, and unassuming wisdom. …vital, confiding, potent, and superbly well-crafted essays…” —Booklist
“There isn’t always an epiphany, but she explains her motivation and her constant, openhearted wonder at her place in this world in a steady, colloquial tone. Sometimes she’s drinking coffee with you, sometimes a piece is a finished travel postcard.” —NewCity
“In the tradition of the best essayists, McNair’s writing is marked by an honest vulnerability… take in the landscape where those hard-to-pin-down universal truths reside. Through McNair’s thoroughly modern lens, the universals seem at once fresh and familiar: our hunger for love, peace, a good meal, a cool drink.” —Christine Maul Rice, for Hypertext Magazine
“McNair’s essays are challenging, colloquial, and contemplative. Her work recalls Jo Ann Beard and Mary Karr in its powerful insistence and range.” —Joe Meno, Book of Extraordinary Tragedies
“The essays in And These Are the Good Times are so arrestingly good that I had to stop several times to marvel at how keen, generous, and compassionate Patricia McNair’s writing is. She’s put her arms around the world and embraced so many of its complexities with the great heart and wondering eye of a poet.” —Christine Sneed, Direct Sunlight
“In this heartfelt collection of essays that run the gamut of emotions, Patricia Ann McNair, with her usual wit, wisdom, and unflinching honesty, articulates all manner of crucial questions …” —Eric Charles May, Bedrock Faith
“Patricia Ann McNair is a brilliant essayist. Her intelligence is fierce, her prose is luminous, her storytelling is enthralling… My God, my heart.” —Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
Finalist! Montaigne Medal for most thought-provoking book of 2017, Eric Hoffer Awards.