"Lordy, what a wickedly wise writer T. M. McNally is. The 
Gateway is a terrific book, impatient and wrought up, a book 
that goes a long way toward answering this age-old question: Why 
do fools fall in love? Here are seven answers, each beguiling and 
break-neck and bedeviling."—Lee K. Abbott

"McNally writes from the inside out. These dramatic 
contemplations on the radical ways we connect in families show 
his remarkable vision. In prose at once fierce and elegiac, these 
powerful stories compose a careful and rueful celebration of our 
times."—Ron Carlson

"Uncommonly dense, complex, and well-made, these stories are 
vaultingly ambitious, featuring a wide range of character and 
milieu. McNally's recurring interests are tricky relationships with 
fathers, with God; infidelity (on many levels); an obsession with 
history (especially World War II); generational legacy/burden/
shadow. Eliot said, 'But there's no vocabulary/For the love within 
a family./This love is silent.' The Gateway, in what seems to me a 
minor miracle, finds the words."—David Shields

"McNally is a contemporary American writer in that he is 
completely unsentimental and accustomed to irony; but he is a rare 
writer for our times in that his work contains a genuine wistfulness 
for gentler times, gentler connections between husbands, wives, 
and children. It is the wistfulness of diminished expectations 
without a loss of hope."—Tracy Daugherty

McNally's subject in the seven stories in this, his third story 
collection, is love, always love. For him, these are religious stories 
for skeptics who are spiritually inclined.

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T. M. McNALLY is the author of five other works of fiction: the 
novels Until Your Heart Stops, a New York Times Notable Book; 
Almost Home, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year; 
and The Goat Bridge, a Booklist Editors' Choice for 2005; and two 
prize-winning collections, Low Flying Aircraft, a Flannery O'Connor 
Award winner, and Quick. His stories have appeared in venues such 
as Conjunctions, DoubleTake, Yale Review, Southwest Review, and 
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. The recipient of fellowships 
from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Howard 
Foundation at Brown University, he teaches in the Creative Writing 
program at Arizona State University.



What people are saying about this book

"The very best thing about McNally is the way he moves in—guided
missile-like—to the place inside his characters where terror and 
hope collide.  He meets them at their souls' center and reveals them
entirely, respectfully, miraculously in words."—Pam Houston