IN HIS OWN WORDS: SCOTT McLANAHAN

Mission statement of The Literary Terrorists

I don't come out of collected works. My words have not eaten words--they devour exciting happenings, feed on rough weather, and dig their food out of earth and men. I'm on my way with dust in my shoes free of mythology, bitches: send books back to their shelves, I'm going down into the streets. I learned about life from life itself, love I learned in a single kiss and could teach no one anything except that I have lived with something in common among men, when fighting with them, when saying all their say in my song.
- Scott McLanahan

Paperback: 156 pages
Publisher: Six Gallery Press (November 25, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1926616146
ISBN-13: 978-1926616148
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.4 inches

"Some readers act for the rhythm of the language, the aesthetics of the words. Some act for the story itself, for the characters, not the depictions of them. Scott McClanahan's Stories II falls into the extreme latter camp. In this, McClanahan's second collection from Six Gallery Press (after 2008's Stories I) each tale comes stripped of any linguistic flamboyance, opting instead for a casual, oral fable style frame around which to display beautiful nuggets of piercing insight.

This insight most often comes in the form of direct address, cornering the reader into what should be an uncomfortable defense. But after having been lulled by so many pages of elegantly simple prose, each moment of author-reader intimacy hits with stark impact."
- Caleb J. Ross

"This is a collection that exists firmly in McClanahan territory, a world where some guy named Scott seeks to not just make sense of the world around him, but embrace it for all it has to offer. Its a world filled with death and illness, dog's goiters, iconic kidney stones and adulterers being beaten to a pulp even as the narrator eats said adulterer's pizza and watches the aforementioned beating. And yet, here's the thing, Stories II is more than that as well, because in this collection Scott bends his stories further in terms of religion and ghosts, adding a layer of mysticism and spirituality that both enriches the stories and takes them from the near fables of Stories to actual fables, fables about a guy named Scott just trying to make sense of the weirdness, humor and sadness that permeates the world around us."
- Ben Tanzer

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