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Review of THRILLING TALES

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• Review of THRILLING TALES

• Review of THRILLING TALES

  Mark > September 9th, 2003, 01:02 AM

• Review of THRILLING TALES

  knivesout > September 9th, 2003, 01:18 AM

  It's a really good idea, and a good book. As wth any collection of diverse writers, there's somethign in there for every reader to dislike, but I for one enjoyed almost every story immensely. It took me back to those books of 'Adventures stories for boys' that I used tread as a boy, though a lot of the stuff is a lot more - um - literary, I guess, than those books were.
  The range was good - adventure, crime, western, fantasy, even a dose of SF. The range of authors, including as it did bestsellers like King and Crichton alongside the more 'arty' McSweeney's crowd was good too.
  I believe there is a second volume planned - I look forward to it.

• Review of THRILLING TALES

  Mark > October 28th, 2003, 11:06 PM

• Review of THRILLING TALES

  Mark > January 11th, 2004, 09:33 AM

  McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales
  Reviewer: Owen Richardson
  January 10, 2004
  
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  Nick Hornby writes about a VCR that fast-forwards into the future.
  
  MCSWEENEY'S MAMMOTH TREASURY OF THRILLING TALES
  Edited by Michael Chabon
  Hamish Hamilton, $39.95
  
  
  Michael Chabon's introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Book of Thrilling Tales says: "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." Nowadays, complains Chabon, all we get is the " 'contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story' ", and it is his purpose in this anthology, originally published as issue 10 of the literary magazine McSweeney's, and now available as a book, to redress this balance with stories written in those genres he evokes.
  
  Borrowing the aggressively self-deprecating tone beloved of McSweeney's editor, Dave Eggers, Chabon describes his thesis as "semi-coherent, ill-reasoned, and doubtless mistaken", and it is. Where do writers of experimental short fiction such as Donald Barthelme and Guy Davenport fit in? Is "plot" the same as physical action? In its perfunctory way, Chabon's introduction takes its place in the continuing argument about how serious writing has lost touch with entertainment values, how books used to be interesting until Modernism came along and made them fit only for academics, but doesn't add much to it. It's just a cool idea for an anthology, and what with the Harry Potterisation of publishing, it's a canny one too.
  
  Rest at
  
  http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/0...41488.html

• Review of THRILLING TALES

  Mark > December 3rd, 2004, 01:52 PM

  Able to leap over literary barriers in a single book
  
  Chabon ranges from Kabbalah to Captain Nemo
  
  By Erik Spanberg
  
  When Michael Chabon was just 8 years old, baseball broke his heart. He can remember watching the Senators on TV with his dad in a Washington suburb. "Then they were packed up in the dead of the night and shipped off to Texas and became the Rangers," he says. "How can that be? How can they let that happen? It's like trying to explain to my children, how can an election possibly be stolen? And, of course, Texas, once again, was involved there."
  Such sentiments conjure all of Mr. Chabon's sensibilities: childlike wonder hardened by adult reality, blended with humor and resignation.
  
  Over the years, he's switched baseball affiliations a couple of times, first to the Pittsburgh Pirates and, later, the San Francisco Giants, nearer his Berkeley home. But Chabon's literary career is far less checkered than his baseball romances: At 23, his thesis manuscript was sent by a professor to an agent and garnered the highest advance ever paid for a debut literary novel. "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" became a bestseller, followed by another hit, "Wonder Boys," a winking nod to fellow writers blessed and burdened by early literary success. In 2000, Chabon took all the promise of those works and melded it with a childhood passion - comic books - to write, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," which won a Pulitzer Prize.
  
  rest at
  http://csmonitor.com/2004/1130/p17s01-bogn.html

• Review of THRILLING TALES

  Mark > December 9th, 2004, 03:21 PM

  McSweeney's scares up chilling tales in 'Chamber'
  By Joanne Skerrett, Globe Staff | December 8, 2004
  
  McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, Edited by Michael Chabon, Vintage, 328 pp., paperback, $13.95
  
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  McSweeney's, the eccentric literary journal started in the late 1990s by novelist Dave Eggers, has unleashed its latest anthology, packing a good scare into some pleasurable reading. "McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories" is the follow-up to the hugely successful "Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales," which was also edited by author Michael Chabon, a frequent contributor to the journal. In the introduction to "Astonishing," Chabon writes that the horror genre "is -- in a fundamental and perhaps ineradicable way -- a marketing tool," and this collection could probably sell itself as one that breaks many of the rules of genre writing and cleverly gets away with it .
  
  The collection boasts a mix of talented writers whose divergent styles and skills bring forth a set of tales that is sometimes uneven yet manages to terrify or amuse. The first, Margaret Atwood's "Lusus Naturae," about a disfigured woman abandoned by her family on an old farm, is deftly written and sets a high bar for the rest of the collection. Irish author Roddy Doyle's "The Child" and Jonathan Lethem's "Vivian Relf" are other fine pieces. "Vivian Relf," which tells of two strangers who keep running into each other, is an almost love story with an air of mystery surrounding it -- a true standout.
  
  The recurring theme, of course, is horror, and who better than Stephen King to pen one of the collection's best pieces, which ironically is less terrifying than it is evocative and stylishly detailed. King is not at his best in "Lisey and the Madman," a novella about an author being stalked by a maniacal fan, but he hits the bull's-eye by presenting a nuanced examination of the relationship between the famous figure and the dutiful, sometimes adoring, sometimes resentful spouse.
  
  rest at
  
  http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/...n_chamber/
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