John McManus was born in Knoxville in 1977 and grew up in Blount County, Tennessee, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. He currently lives in Cape Town. He is the author of three books of fiction: the novel Bitter Milk (2005) and the short story collections Born on a Train (2003) and Stop Breakin Down (2000), all available from Picador USA. His fourth book, Fox Tooth Heart, will be published by Sarabande Books in 2015. He has received a 2013 Creative Capital innovative literature grant and a 2014 Fulbright scholar grant to research and write his new novel about gay refugees in South Africa. For Stop Breakin Down he received the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award. Chapters of his novel-in-progress The Cultivationists have appeared in American Short Fiction, Plots With Guns, Fiddleblack, and Grist: A Journal for Writers. In addition to these journals, his fiction and non-fiction have been published in Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, The Oxford American, Tin House, StorySouth, The Literary Review, The Columbia Review, Paraphilia, and Night Train, as well as the fiction anthologies Surreal South ‘09, Surreal South ‘11, Apparitional Experience, and Degrees of Elevation, and as a literary critic in Fiddleblack’s annotated edition of Cabal by Clive Barker. McManus is an associate professor of creative writing in the MFA creative writing program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Goddard College in Vermont. He is contributing editor at Fiddleblack, a small press and literary journal dedicated to creative writing with a strong sense of place.
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Stop Breakin DownStoriesFrom"The Magothy Fires"
Each pub has a barrel-rolling team. That makes ten teams. You wear fireproof gloves. The barrel is full of flaming tar. You have to see how long you can keep the barrel up in the air. It works like a relay. Four people on the team. You pass it to the next bloke when you get too hot and the barrel gets too heavy. You hold it high up above you and in your hands you rotate it; the flames shoot out into the crowd as you run down the streets. The people compact into themselves. You shout and the people duck down and run back and climb over each other and the flames shoot out at them and you laugh at the manic growls of fear and panic. There haven’t been more than a few deaths.
Stop Breakin Down:Stories -
Stop Breakin DownStoriesFrom"The Body Painters"
Warren brought Toast to the party with him. Toast is a chicken. One evening two years ago Warren phoned his cousin and said Hey, man, I’m horny, bring some chicks over. His cousin lives on a farm. He gathered up twelve chicks from the barn and threw them in the back of his pickup truck and drove them to Warren’s apartment.
Warren said, Dude, that’s so totally not what I meant.
The dog ate eleven of them. The survivor ran around the house and slid around on the kitchen floor and squeaked when it was hungry. That chicken’s gonna be toast pretty damn soon, someone said. That’s why they call him Toast.
Stop Breakin Down:Stories -
Stop Breakin DownStoriesFrom"Vlad the Nefarious"
at the suspension center the counselor said keep a journal.
i said piss on that.
she said watch your mouth & i said watch your own or ill smack you upside of it.
i mean I always wanted to have a journal but i couldnt tell her that. i said fuck off i aint keepin a journal, she said its a requirement, i said pissonit.
so im doing it anyways i just aint lettin on to that old diesel-dyke bitch about it.
why its lowercase is coz that’s what trent says you do if you write stuff down, if your good you do it lowercase. like he says if you write poems thats what they all do all the poets do he said.
Stop Breakin Down:Stories
“Bitter Milk will challenge many readers with its continuous narrative (no chapter breaks) and tricky parsing of a 9-year-old’s reality. But McManus has chosen not to offer up a glib version of a child’s tortured quest for truth. Rather, he burrows deep inside his character to create a fresh, unforgettable portrait that is both firmly rooted in its Appalachian setting and universal in its appeal.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Born on a Train, then, is not cheerful. But it is held together by the dogged determination of the author, who at once insists that this is what life is ‘like,’ and holds his vision together with a tightly controlled series of recurring images—of drugs and dead leaves and sorry dogs and shadows. This is a shadow world, the ‘dark’ side of America, and like a shadow you can’t get rid of it. That shadow glides out from all the church suppers and movies in mini-malls and houses with lawns and middle-class heterosexuals tucked up in bed watching the 11 o’clock news. All you have to do to find that world is take a look.” —Carolyn See, The Washington Post
“McManus’s consciousness flows not like a stream, but a flash flood. His characters all live on the ragged edge of physical and emotional crisis, often dulled by intoxication but always on the verge of a moment of clarity. McManus straps them into a screaming, circular drag toward nothingness in what seems like one long, breathless take.” —San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle [on Stop Breakin Down]
Selected Works
