"A good book gets under your skin. A great book moves you toward 
wisdom. The End of the Straight and Narrow is the wisest book I've 
read in a very long time. This is smart, sharp, soul-testing American 
fiction."—Alyson Hagy, author of Snow, Ashes

David McGlynn's first collection takes on the inner lives of the 
zealous, their passions and desires, and the ways religious faith is 
both the compass for navigating daily life and the force that makes 
ordinary life impossible. From the coastal highways of Southern 
California to the bayous of Houston, Texas, the stories take place 
against the backdrop of disaster—a landslide, a fire, a drowning, a 
hurricane—as the characters question whether faith illuminates the 
world or leaves them isolated within it.

"When a young writer proves in a first collection that he is the real 
thing, when the stories are as riveting and haunting as David 
McGlynn's are, the temptation is to ask how it is possible. McGlynn 
writes both elegantly and deeply about the trick of salvation and the 
strange consolation of suffering itself, about the sorrows of the faithful 
and the faith that's required of the nonbeliever."—Jane Hamilton, 
author of When Madeline Was Young

"Whether he imagines a child whose final wish is to kill, or enters the 
heart and mind of a young man who blames himself for his mother's 
blindness, McGlynn moves with such patience and curiosity, such 
exquisite tenderness for his people, we feel his life and ours may 
hang in the balance."—Melanie Rae Thon, author of Sweet Hearts.

"David McGlynn's profoundly compassionate stories are sure-footed 
and often witty, grounded in a vision so rich and full it seems to bring 
extra color to the world. With these luminous stories, David McGlynn 
announces himself as a writer of consequence."—Erin McGraw, 
author of The Good Life

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DAVID McGLYNN's fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared 
in Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, Mid-American Review, 
Shenandoah, and other literary journals. He received his M.F.A. and 
Ph.D. from the University of Utah. He teaches at Lawrence University 
in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he lives with his wife and sons.



What people are saying about this book

"A collection as humbling as it is meet. I am impressed by his 'believers' 
whom he refuses to trivialize, categorize, or marginalize. I haven't the 
words to say what a wallop McGlynn laid upside my head."—Lee K. 
Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once

"Wonderfully controlled stories of the well-intentioned and the flawed, 
those precarious souls who attempt to live a moral life in an often 
immoral universe. McGlynn's collection is not just entertaining and 
memorable, but necessary."—Lee Martin, author of The Bright 
Forever