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By Root 541 0

Cheever, Coppard. Heavyweights all, some considered among the giants of modernism, source of the moment-of-truth story that, like homo sapiens, appeared relatively late on the scene but has worked very quickly to wipe out all its rivals. Short fiction, in all its rich variety, was published not only by the pulps, which gave us Hammett, Chandler, and Lovecraft among a very few other writers now enshrined more or less safely in the canon, but also in the great slick magazines of the time: The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Liberty, and even The New Yorker, that proud bastion of the moment-of-truth story that has only recently, and not without controversy, made room in its august confines for the likes of the Last Master of the Plotted Short Story, Stephen King. Very often these stories contained enough plot and color to support an entire feature-length Hollywood adaptation. Adapted for film and radio, some of them, like “The Monkey’s Paw,” “Rain,” “The Most Dangerous Game,” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” have been imitated and parodied and have had their atoms scattered in the general stream of the national imagination and the public domain.

About six months ago, I was going on in this vein to Mr. Eggers, the publisher of this magazine, saying things like, “Actually, Dave, horror stories are all psychology,” and “All short stories, in other words, are ghost stories, accounts of visitations and reckonings with the traces of the past.” Emboldened by the fact that he had not completely succumbed to unconsciousness, I went on to say that it was my greatest dream in life (other than hearing Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind” performed by a mariachi orchestra) someday to publish a magazine of my own, one that would revive the lost genres of short fiction, a tradition I saw as one of great writers writing great short stories. I would publish works both by “non-genre” writers who, like me, found themselves chafing under the strictures of the Ban, and by recognized masters of the genre novel who, fifty years ago, would have regularly worked and published in the short story form but who now have no wide or ready market for shorter work. And I would toss in a serialized novel, too, carrying the tradition all the way back to the days of The Strand and Argosy. I would—

“If I let you guest-edit an issue of McSweeney’s,” said Mr. Eggers, “can we please stop talking about this?”

The McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales is the result of this noble gesture. Whether the experiment has been a success, I leave to the reader to judge. I will say, however, that while they were working on their stories, a number of the writers found within these covers reported to me, via giddy e-mails, that they had forgotten how much fun writing a short story could be. I think that we have forgotten how much fun reading a short story can be, and I hope that if nothing else, this treasury goes some small distance toward reminding us of that lost but fundamental truth.

—Michael Chabon

Tedford and the Megalodon

By JIM SHEPARD

He went in search of a relic of earth’s past, and came face-to-

face with the mortal specter of his own!

She’d brought some books with him on the way out, but had lost the lot of them on the transfer to the smaller boat. One of the lifting pallets had upset and spilled the crate down the side of the ship. His almanac had been saved, for which he was thankful.

Among the losses had been his Simpson and his Eldredge; his Osteology and Relationships of Chondrichthyans; his Boys’ Book of Songs, Balfour’s Development of Elasmobranch Fishes, and, thrown in from his childhood, his Beadle’s Boy’s Library, including Wide Awake Ned: The Boy Wizard.

Above his head, interstellar space was impossibly black. That night he wrote in his almanac, Velvet set with piercing bits of light. There seemed to be, spread above him, some kind of galactic cloud arrangement. Stars arced up over one horizon and down the other. The water nearest the ice seemed disturbingly calm. Little wavelets lapped the prow of the nearest kayak. The cold