T. M. 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.

In “Bastogne,” a middle-aged son visiting the French countryside where his father was wounded in World War II pursues his father’s early ghosts, along with some of his own. In “Given,” the father of the lovely Annabella determines to provide a means of escape for his cherished daughter who has made a drastic mistake in her choice of a husband. And in the title story, a man and his wife celebrate their wedding anniversary in Paris where he muses about the bittersweet vagaries of his life and loves and about his wife’s younger days in the City of Light.

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 Howard Foundation at Brown University and the National Endowment for the Arts, he teaches at Arizona State University.

“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 wistfulness without a loss of hope.” --Tracy Daugherty

“I nominate McNally as a master mason of a great new wall of words. This is a powerful read.” --Michael Martone

“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

“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; 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 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

“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