Fox Tooth Heart: Stories

by John McManus

Overview

“Bold and ingenious” stories about the dark heart of America by the acclaimed Whiting Award–winning author (The New York Times Book Review).
 
“Feverish, psychotropic, bold, mesmerizing, painful, Fox Tooth Heart is full of stories about people living on the margins of society, characters born into dark circumstances, or . . . driven there by their own obsessions and addictions” (Huffington Post)—murderers, loners, addicts, neurotics and outcasts stumbling side-by-side with “the down-and-out heroes of George Saunders or John Updike, captured just before their fall” (Vice.com).
 
In this “achingly visceral . . . masterpiece” McManus ventures from trailers hidden in deep Southern woods to an Arkansas ranch converted into an elephant refuge to a Georgia tent community of sex offenders to a Kentucky band of teenage Satanists. His lost-soul men, women, and children reel precariously between common anxiety and drug-enhanced paranoia, sober reality and fearsome hallucination (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

“Powered by radiant prose” (Vanity Fair), these nine “eccentric . . . wildly inventive” (Publishers Weekly) stories of twisted humor and pathos re-establish McManus as one of the most bracing voices of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941411148
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	11/16/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	241
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

John McManus is the author of the novel Bitter Milk and the short story collections Born on a Train and Stop Breakin Down, all published by Picador. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Oxford American, The Literary Review, Harvard Review, and many other places. He is the youngest-ever recipient of the Whiting Award.

Table of Contents

Elephant Sanctuary
Blood Brothers
The Uncanny Valley
Betsy From Pike
Bugaboo
The Ninety-­Fifth Percentile
The Gnat Line
Gainliness
Gateway to the Ozarks

Editorial Reviews

Fox Tooth Heart…isn't going to be every book club's next selection. But the exciting thing about reading McManus is watching how closely he skirts toward exploitative, lurid caricature, then routinely swerves into territory that is humane and insightful…More often than not…McManus burrows deep under the skins of his rough, cast-out characters and emerges with stories that are bold and ingenious. Fox Tooth Heart contains a healthy crop of characters who are total sickos; I wish McManus had written more pages about them.

The New York Times Book Review - Claiborne Smith

Selected by the American Booksellers Association as an Indie Next Pick for December 2015

"McManus burrows deep under the skins of his rough, cast-out characters and emerges with stories that are bold and ingenious."
—The New York Times

"McManus invites readers on an eccentric journey through Southern, Southwestern, and Middle America in this collection of wildly inventive short stories. Though they’re set in America, they exist in a meticulously crafted world, quite different than our own.... McManus delves into the minds of his characters, allowing readers to experience their anxieties, delusions, fantasies, and fears."
—Publishers Weekly

"McManus shows a quirky originality in these nine stories as he focuses on the outré and bizarre doings of his off-center characters. Along with creating a compelling cast, McManus shows himself a master of openings. With his strange cast of drunks, murderers, and the drug-addled, McManus fits comfortably into a tradition of Gothic writing, adding his own—dare one say peculiar?—twists."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Fox Tooth Heart will impress readers....McManus is a terrific writer. Regarding the “Southern decadence” in his stories, consider that Edgar Poe’s lunatics and sensualists also blacked out from opium, alcohol or fear; and that Tennessee Williams’ depraved neurotics, like the playwright himself, often ran from truths of the heart."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"In his new collection of stories, Fox Tooth Heart, John McManus puts his arm around our shoulder and walks us out to the margin, calmly pointing out all the unfortunate souls who have stepped across the thin line. When he turns us away from the grotesque, toward the homes his characters can’t find their way back to, the familiar is dizzying in its sway."
—The Literary Review

"McManus has a gift for idiosyncratic openings that make the reader lean in and listen. His sentences carry a confidential note. They make you excited and a little afraid for whatever is coming around the corner....He is a major American author with a wonderful eye for people’s insecurities and a wonderful ear for the babble of their dreams. Fox Tooth Heart ...contains several stories that will rattle around in your brain for a long time after re-reading."
—Electric Literature

"[Y]ou'll hear McManus get compared to Denis Johnson, but that's not quite right. Sure, his characters are junkies and derelicts, but McManus doesn't have Johnson's affinity for the divine. His are the down-and-out heroes of George Saunders or John Updike, captured just before their fall. They're people struggling for their place in the world or who must settle for something less than they've hoped for....Fox Tooth Heart is the work of an older man still grappling with how we come by the beliefs that define us."
—VICE

"This collection of short stories has such diversity in character and theme that reading more than one story in a sitting can be psychologically challenging…. [The stories] are unsettling, amusing, curious and intriguing, and they will hold your mind firmly in their grasp."
—Philadelphia Gay News

"McManus’s fiction is difficult to pin down: though his characters often exist on the fringes of society, there’s a strain of surrealism running through the proceedings.... But for all of their stranger elements, the worlds in which these are set feel decidedly lived-in...These are stories in which the pastoral, historical atrocities, and contemporary bad behavior all collide."
—Literary Hub

"[McManus's] prose is terse and effective, like poetry can be."
—Oxford American

From the Publisher

2015-08-16
McManus shows a quirky originality in these nine stories as he focuses on the outré and bizarre doings of his off-center characters. Along with creating a compelling cast, McManus shows himself a master of openings. "Elephant Sanctuary" begins with the following outlandish and compelling sentence: "The story of the creation of my elephant vampire songs begins on the December morning when I killed Aisling, heroine of our last album and my fiancée, in one Jaguar and fled Texas in another." This sentence anticipates in miniature the unfolding of the rest of the tale as we learn that the con-man father of the songwriter narrator claims to have won an elephant sanctuary with a Dolly Parton (a nine-five combo) in Texas Hold 'em and the narrator has in fact murdered his fiancee. And these are not by any means the most oddball characters we meet in McManus' stories. Another is Victor, in "Gainliness," whose eccentricities include using needle-nosed pliers to pick his nose, swallowing toothpaste, and starting major journeys on his left foot. "The Ninety-Fifth Percentile" introduces a number of spoiled and privileged students at a Texas high school, all of whom have IQ scores in the 95th percentile. The story explores not only their sense of entitlement, but also their attitudes toward immigrants moving in on their territory (both geographical and intellectual), their commitment to fast cars and drugs du jour, and their explorations of both hetero- and homosexuality. With his strange cast of drunks, murderers, and the drug-addled, McManus fits comfortably into a tradition of Gothic writing, adding his own—dare one say peculiar?—twists.

Kirkus Reviews