A Fictional History of the United States with huge chunks missing by T. Cooper & Adam Mansbach
I've been remiss on reading for awhile. Once baseball season starts, it's tough for me to tear away from the games. Fortunately I can still read as long as it's not too long and involved. Voila, the short story anthology.
A Fictional History of the United States with huge chunks missing takes 17 different writers viewpoints on various times in the U.S. history, and allows them to rewrite them however they see fit. As one grows older, one realizes that the stuff they teach you in history class is not always what really happened. These stories are not really what happened either. Not even close. On the surface, it's a great premise, but for the most part it falls kind of flat. The writing is very good for all the stories (and cartoons), but some are just better than others. A couple of the stories tried to show the irony of the situations at hand, and that's clever and cool, but to me that's just a little heavy for this anthology. I preferred the stories that were just a little more ridiculous.
The one I preferred most was probably Kate Bornstein's 1865: Huck Finn, Tranny Hooker, and that's not just because of the title. It probably helped though. This story supposes that Huck Finn has moved to New Orleans to be a tranny hooker of fine genteel Southern heritage. Huck reveals this information via a letter to Tom Sawyer. I could hear Samuel Clemens laugh out loud when I read it. Others of note are T Cooper's 1932: The Lindbergh Baby which is an interview of Charles Lindbergh Jr. to Gay Aviation magazine on his kidnapping by Al Capone, Benjamin Weissman's 1846: Manifest Destiny, a laugh out loud take on the westward expansion with an homage to the Donner Party and a dash of crazy Brigham Young thrown in, and Keith Knight's cartoon 1971: The Harlem Globetrotters, which supposes that the one time the Harlem Globetrotters lost a game, the crowd attending included John Allen Muhammed, John Hinckley, Mark David Chapman, and Jeffrey Dahmer.
As you can guess, these stories are absurdly funny. Unfortunately the rest of the stories were not so absurdly funny. In fact, most of the other stories were kind of droll. That's not to say that they weren't well written or clever. They were. It's just that they didn't really appeal to me all that much. Who knows, they may appeal to you. If you're in a bookstore and you spot this book, definitely read the Huck Finn story, or any of the other ones I've listed above. If you like those, you may wind up liking the rest of them too. I'm going to say that none of these will make it into the Best Short Stories Anthology for 2007, but a couple of them are worthy of your time.
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