Free Download | McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales | Michael Chabon

The authors themselves may be on lots of "Best Authors Writing Today" lists, but most of these stories sound like assignments rather than works of some sort of inspiration (however unexalted that inspiration might be). The collection is the short-story equivalent of a set of academic essays in honor of a retiring scholar. In other words, although the subjects may interest the authors, it seems as though some of them wrote the stories because they were asked to and because they didn't mind having them in a collection with a bunch of other "assigned" work. If you finish books that you bought (even if you don't like them) because not finishing them is a waste of money, don't buy this book, get it out of your library instead. That way you can skip the stories that are really tedious (for instance, The Albertine Notes, which was really a poor rendering of a post-apocalyptic Manhattan with some trippy mind/time travel thrown in) with a clear conscience.