McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [0]
Title Page
The Editor’s Notebook - A Confidential Chat with the Editor
Tedford and the Megalodon
The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened Thereafter
The Bees
Catskin
How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman
II
III
The General
Closing Time
Otherwise Pandemonium
The Tale of Gray Dick
Blood Doesn’t Come Out
Weaving the Dark
Chuck’s Bucket
Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly
The Case of the Nazi Canary - A SEATON BEGG MYSTERY
AUTHOR OF
CHAPTER ONE - MESSAGE FROM MUNICH
CHAPTER TWO - HOMICIDE OR SUICIDE?
CHAPTER THREE - LEADING THE MASTER RACE
CHAPTER FOUR - FEAR AND TREMBLING
CHAPTER FIVE - THE POLITICS OF EXCLUSION
CHAPTER SIX - THE FEDERAL AGENT
CHAPTER SEVEN - INTERVIEW WITH A SAVIOR
CHAPTER EIGHT - THE VIOLINIST OF THE CAFÉ ORCHESTRA
The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers
Ghost Dance
Goodbye to All That
Private Grave 9
The Albertine Notes
The Martian Agent. - a Planetary Romance
CHAPTER ONE - WHELPS
This Book Benefits 826 Valencia
Copyright Page
The Editor’s Notebook
A Confidential Chat with the Editor
For the last year or so I have been boring my friends, and not a few strangers, with a semi-coherent, ill-reasoned, and doubtless mistaken rant on the subject of the American short story as it is currently written.
The rant goes something like this (actually this is the first time I have so formulated it): Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe every kind of novel from the canon of the future but the nurse romance. Not merely from the critical canon, but from the store racks and library shelves as well. Nobody could be paid, published, lionized, or cherished among the gods of literature for writing any kind of fiction other than nurse romances. Now, because of my faith and pride in the diverse and rigorous brilliance of American writers of the last half-century, I do believe that from this bizarre decision, in this theoretical America, a dozen or more authentic masterpieces would have emerged. Thomas Pynchon’s Blitz Nurse, for example, and Cynthia Ozick’s Ruth Puttermesser, R.N. One imagines, however, that this particular genre—that any genre, even one far less circumscribed in its elements and possibilities than the nurse romance—would have paled somewhat by the year 2002. Over the last year in that oddly diminished world, somebody, somewhere, would be laying down Michael Chabon’s Dr. Kavalier and Nurse Clay with a weary sigh and crying out, “Surely, oh, surely there must be more to the novel than this!”
Instead of “the novel” and “the nurse romance,” try this little Gedankenexperiment with “jazz” and “the bossa nova,” or with “cinema” and “fish-out-of-water comedies.” Now, go ahead and try it with “short fiction” and “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.”
Suddenly you find yourself sitting right back in your very own universe.
Okay, I confess. I am that bored reader, in that circumscribed world, laying aside his book with a sigh; only the book is my own, and it is filled with my own short stories, plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew. It was in large part a result of a crisis—a word much beloved of tedious ranteurs—in my own attitude toward my work in the short story form that sent me back into the stream of alternate time, back to the world as it was before we all made that fateful and perverse decision.
As late as about 1950, if I referred to “short fiction,” I might have been talking about any one of the following kinds of stories: the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy, or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war, or historical story; the romance story. Stories, in other words, with plots. A glance at any dusty paperback anthology of classic tales proves the truth of this assertion, but more startling are the names of the authors of these ripping yarns: Poe, Balzac, Wharton, James, Conrad, Graves, Maugham, Faulkner, Twain,