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Title: McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales by Michael Chabon ISBN: 1-4000-3339-X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.46 (24 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Worth the price of admission
Comment: I think the reader from Cracow overstates the case. The most interesting stories in the collection, to my mind, are the solid genre stories turned in by some of the allegedly non-genre writers. For content, Moody's "The Albertine Notes" and Hornby's "Otherwise Pandemonium" would be quite at home in the pages of =The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction=, while Chabon's "The Martian Agent" does for Michael Moorcock's Oswald Bastable stories (=Warlord of the Air=, etc.) what Moorcock did for Conan-style sword and sorcery in the 1960s. (By contrast, Moorcock himself phones it in here with "The Case of the Nazi Canary", a reasonably entertaining but lazy alternate history, starring various of his Beggs and von Beks, that could have done with a couple more rewrites.)
Beyond that, Glen David Gold's mystery "The Tears of Squonk" lives up to the promise of his novel =Carter Beats the Devil=. "Ghost Dance", Sherman Alexie's zombie Western, may be short on plot, but it's long on atmosphere; likewise Jim Shepard's "Tedford and the Megalodon".
On the genre side, Carol Emshwiller, Elmore Leonard, and Kelly Link are pitch-perfect as always; so is Karen Joy Fowler, though her "Private Grave 9" stays firmly in the slipstream, never quite manages to become either a mystery or a ghost story. Neil Gaiman's ghost story is solid Gaiman, and Stephen King's Dark Tower excerpt is solid King, though it doesn't quite manage to stand on its own. The only stories by genre writers that I didn't enjoy were those by Crichton and Ellison, but I expected that going in; if you enjoy Crichton and Ellison, I expect you'll enjoy their contributions as well.
Some of the "literary" writers obviously did think of this as "slumming" -- Chris Offutt's story is one big MFA-program in-joke, for instance (funny if you know the names he drops, but if not, not) -- but most of them write with a real affection for the material. If the stories they've written here tend to stay on the fringes of the genre and to make a few extra sanding and polishing passes over their prose, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Rating: 2
Summary: disappointing
Comment: I had great hopes for this anthology, but to be charitable, it's not a must-read. Michael Chabon wanted to bring together strong genre and mainstream writers to reinvigorate the short story by turning away from the ubiquitous "moment of truth New Yorker-type" story toward the classic generic tale, i.e., the plot driven short. But the mainstream writers in this collection write as if they know they are slumming, and, ironically, they try too hard to elevate their stories above the very genres they are working in. Thus, the stories don't satisfy at any level, because they're neither very good at playing the generic game nor significant in their own right. As for the generic writers like Ellison, King, Leonard, and Moorcock--well, their stories are about what you'd expect, which means they don't really belong here at all. Their inclusion here mainly serves to underline the failure of the other writers to play the generic game with any success. (Not that these stories are particularly memorable either: Ellison's effort, for example, is a story I've read in one form or another in almost every one of his collections, and King's story from the Roland cycle could conceivably interest those readers who have had the extraordinary patience to follow the Roland cycle in the first place.) The bright spots are stories by Neil Gaiman and, surprisingly, Dave Eggars himself, publisher of McSweeney's. The latter is written with a great deal of care and respect for the reader and the genre (which I'd characterize as the Hemingwayesque travel-adventure tale) and it does manage to revivify that genre in a way the other stories all-too often fail to do. The low point is the execrable offering by Chris Offut, whose narrative conceit is that it was written over a weekend in time for the deadline but unfortunately reads is if it was written the night before. I won't say anything about the bizarre offerings by Sherman Alexie and Kelly Link, or the tired and threadbare plots of Nick Hornby and Michael Crichton.
Maybe what this collection proves is that hybridity doesn't always work. Or maybe what it proves is that one must know the generic rules before one breaks them. Or maybe it just proves I like my drinks straight.
Rating: 4
Summary: An Excellent Collection
Comment: I love to read short fiction. I think the forms of short story, novelet, and novella are sorely overlooked and underappreciated in the literary world today. Having attempted to work with all three forms in my own writing, I know just how hard it is to make even a conditional success of them, let alone turn out works that are complex, and which engage the mind as well as the heart. That's why when I find a modern collection of really good short stories, I invariably rave about it and recommend it to everybody I can find. Such books are increasingly rare treasures in today's easy-reading, fast-food-fiction world, and deserve to be read by as many people as possible.
That's why, if you haven't already, you should run out and find a copy of McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. The list of contributors alone should be enough to get your attention: Stephen King, Carol Emshwiller, Laurie King, Glen David Gold, Michael Chabon, Elmore Leonard, Michael Crichton, Neil Gaiman-and that's just a few of the many excellent writers contributing some truly excellent work to this anthology.
Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, one of the best novels of recent years, says in the introduction that he longed to get away from the "short stories, plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew" that characterize so much of modern short fiction, and return to the great old days of the tightly-plotted tales in pulp magazines. So when Dave Eggers asked him to guest-edit his pomo quarterly, McSweeney's, Chabon jumped at the chance to bring his dream to life. To that end, this book has "pulp" written all over it, from the cover art (taken from an actual 1940 cover from Red Star Mystery Magazine), to the lurid exclamations of the cover copy, to the hyperbolic story summaries on the contents page, to Howard Chaykin's expressive illustrations; the whole creates a package designed to put one in mind of the pulps' heyday-and while the stories within aren't quite that spectacular, they're still damned impressive. I'll describe just a few of them here, due to space limitations as much as anything else--but bear in mind that these are by no means a representative sampling of this varied anthology, just a few of my favorites:
*"The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened After," Glen David Gold's heartfelt meditation on revenge;
*"Catskin," an eerie fairy tale by Kelly Link;
*Nick Hornby's "Otherwise Pandemonium," a great urban fantasy about a teenaged boy whose secondhand VCR shows him the future;
*"Weaving the Dark," by Laurie King, a creepy yet humorous mystery (whose illustration, unfortunately, gives the ending away);
*"Ghost Dance," a dark and grim horror-fest by Sherman Alexie;
*"The Martian Agent, a Planetary Romance," by Chabon himself, an excellent alternative history tale, very much in the vein of Michael Moorcock (himself a contributor), and a delightful closer for the anthology-with the promise of a sequel to come. Can't wait!
Other stories are good, though not perhaps the classics Chabon was hoping for-like Michael Chrichton's "Blood Doesn't Come Out," which is dark and effective though a bit unsavory, Moorcock's "The Case of the Nazi Canary," which is almost too clever and wry for its own good, Harlan Ellison's "Goodbye to All That," a reprint of a story he's already published (the lone exception in an anthology that promises the stories are all new, never before seen), and which is a retread of his Ronald Colman/Shangri-la/shaggy-dog-story-with-a-bad-punchline obsession. It's a decent story, but I would have preferred something original from Harlan. And Stephen King's "The Tale of Gray Dick," an excerpt from the most recent Dark Tower novel, is far more subtle than his usual fare, and less engaging because of it, though it does grow on you.
Probably the best story in McSweeney's is Rick Moody's "The Albertine Notes," a tour de force tale about a drug that allows one to relive memories. It's not unlike a Philip K. Dick story in sensibility, though in terms of writing and execution it's light years past even PKD's best work. The deeper you get into Moody's dark, atmospheric story (set in a near-future New York that is nightmarishly close to our worst surmises about what terrorism could do to it), the more it unfolds and envelops you; perceptions change, events shift, and reality itself goes up for grabs. The climax of the story, told in a Joycelike rush of prose that is one of the most thrilling, enthralling things I've read in years, must be read carefully to be understood; once you do so, I guarantee you a frisson you will remember fondly for a long time. In my opinion, "The Albertine Notes" is one of the best stories I've read in years.
If you love short fiction as much as I do, McSweeney's is for you. It's a multifarious, engaging, occasionally frustrating, but thoroughly excellent read, and one I hope you'll treasure for years to come. The best part is that a second McSweeney's book, likewise edited by Chabon, is due out later this year. If it's anywhere near as good as the first, I'm there.
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Title: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002 by Michael Cart, Dave Eggers ISBN: 0618246940 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 15 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers ISBN: 1400033543 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003 by Zadie Smith ISBN: 0618246967 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 10 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Werewolves in Their Youth : Stories by Michael Chabon ISBN: 0312254385 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 02 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon ISBN: 0312282990 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 25 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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