Staggering Genius golden boy Dave Eggers’ journal swells from magazine to full-fledged 478-page paperback book for its tenth issue. The breathlessly pulpy title is only a little tongue-in-cheek. Mammoth Treasury, guest-edited by Michael Chabon, sets loose its writers on the plot-driven adventure story, the idea being that maybe they can help recapture the ripping yarn’s place of honor alongside what’s usually regarded as Serious Literature. After all, genre fiction was good enough for Hemingway and Poe, so why shouldn’t Nick Hornby spin a sci-fi tale about a VCR that warns of a coming apocalypse? And so here’s 20 tales of sharks, mummies and murderous elephants by such critical darlings as Eggers, Chabon and Sherman Alexie, alongside writers like Elmore Leonard, Michael Moorcock and Neil Gaiman who’ve been hammering out quality writing in oft-disrespected genre ghettos for years. Treasury doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but there’s plenty of fun to be had here. Chris Offutt’s submission has a particularly neat hook: He gets involved in a scheme involving time travel, ghosts and alternate universes in order to break the case of writer’s block that’s preventing him from finishing his story for this book.
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