Danny McBride has spent two decades building a rogues’ gallery of delusional men — televangelist heirs, disgraced principals, minor-league wrestlers convinced they’re one break from stardom — and somehow, until now, he’d never put one on the page. “Thrilling Tales of Modern Men,” his first short-story collection, fixes that with a book that reads like the fever-dream footnotes to everything he’s directed and starred in for the last twenty years.
The premise is simple and endlessly elastic: ten-odd stories, each built around a man convinced he’s the hero of his own narrative and each proving, over and over, that he very much is not. An amateur magician talks himself into a stunt with real teeth. A washed-up sitcom actor declares war on the coyote that killed his dog. Elsewhere, men negotiate divorce, humiliation, and middle age with the same misplaced confidence they’d bring to negotiating a used-car deal. None of it is subtle, and none of it is trying to be — McBride writes toward the joke and the wound at the same time, letting the absurdity of each scenario do the work of exposing something genuinely raw about fragile masculinity underneath.
The strength of the collection is McBride’s ear. Anyone who has watched “Eastbound & Down” or “The Righteous Gemstones” knows he can write a certain kind of American blowhard better than almost anyone working today, and that gift translates cleanly to prose — the dialogue is quick, the internal logic of each disaster is airtight even when the disaster itself is ridiculous, and the collection resists the trap of turning every story into the same joke told twice. Some of these men get back up. Others don’t. McBride seems less interested in redemption arcs than in simply watching the spiral, which gives the book a nerve that pure comedy writing often lacks.
Early critical reaction has been notably warmer than the “actor tries fiction” premise might suggest. Reviewers and fellow writers have singled out the collection’s specificity — the sense that each story is built from an actual, lived-in understanding of ego and self-delusion rather than a celebrity coasting on name recognition — and several have noted that the book earned its spot on the bestseller lists rather than simply trading on McBride’s fame. The consistent praise is for craft as much as comedy: these are stories that hold together on the page, not just punchlines stretched to short-story length.
“Thrilling Tales of Modern Men” won’t be for readers looking for tidy resolutions or likable protagonists — nearly everyone here is some flavor of insufferable. But for anyone who has ever laughed at a man confidently ruining his own life, McBride has built ten variations on the theme that never quite repeat themselves. A sharp, strange, unexpectedly assured debut collection, and a genuine highlight among this week’s new arrivals on the bestseller lists.
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