Paul McComas, '83
Unplugged: A Novel. Paperback, 272 pages; John Daniel & Company, October 2002; ISBN: 1-8802-8460-X.
McComas is a fiction-writing instructor and performance artist whose short story collection, Twenty Questions (1998), is in its third printing. He also is the founder of Rock Against Depression, a teen-suicide prevention program.
Unplugged, writes one commentator, "is an uplifting story in which a burned-out, suicidal young woman finds healing through nature, modern pharmacology, and, not least, love. McComas puts you inside the head of the clinically depressed and sheds needed light on a little-understood phenomenon."
First Person Imperfect, Paul McComas, ed. Paperback, 200 pages,
iUniverse, Inc., December 2003.
Supported by a grant from Northwestern University, Paul
McComas and
the nine members of his Advanced Fiction Writing workshop have published a
collection
of 19 new stories, all voiced in the first-person. Each contributing author
has studied with McComas — author of the novel Unplugged (2002)
and the short-story collection Twenty Questions (1998) — for
one to five years, initially through Northwestern’s Minicourse Program
and subsequently in his private AFW Workshop.
.
The book is “a team effort,” McComas says. “Every story here
has benefited from the suggestions of the other contributors, for each has been ‘workshopped’ by
the entire group, in part or in whole.” Included in the 19 stories are
two by McComas, “Dig and Drive” and “I Was a Teenage Disco
Prince.”
Ships in the Night and Other Stories, by William F. Nolan, foreword by Paul
McComas, ’83. Paperback, 265 pages, Capra Press, March 2005.
William F. Nolen, author of Logan’s Run, has written 75 books
in multiple genres, and his works have been selected for over 300 anthologies
and textbooks.
He has been cited for excellence by the American Library Association and is
a two-time winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award. Paul
McComas,
a longtime Nolen friend and protégé, is the author of a novel,
Unplugged, and a short-story collection, Twenty Questions, and editor of First
Person Imperfect, a collection of stories by his writing students.
Ships in the Night gathers many genres under one pen — western, detective,
sports, sci-fi, the human condition. All the familiar Nolan trademarks are
here, as McComas writes in his foreword: “characters defined through
their actions, storylines that unfurl with alacrity and grace, description
as concise as it is complete. This is an ambitious book, for Nolan tackles
no less a topic than humanity itself.”
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