Danny McBride Leaves You Wandering

I imagine the pitch for Danny McBride’s new short story collection, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, went a little something like this: Hey, this is Danny McBride’s agent.

Yeah, that guy.

He wants to write a short story collection called something like Thrilling Tales of Modern Men. And I imagine the response from the editor at Random House was similar to my own, upon hearing about the book: Hell yeah.

Amidst a moment in our culture where the question of what defines the contemporary man is subject to quarterly declarations of a loneliness epidemic and, in a fun new twist, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/pete-hegseth-says-military-will-test-service-members-testosterone-leve-rcna587682">mandatory testosterone tests, there's basically nobody better suited to probe the hollow inner workings of modern masculinity than McBride.

He’s had a lot of practice, after all.

As a screenwriter and performer, he’s demonstrated a particular genius for understanding the Dumb Guy in a way that only a really smart one can.

That McBride can write is not in dispute, but I’m not sure what, exactly, to make of this book or his intentions behind it. 

The difficulty I found in reading and responding to Thrilling Tales is that Danny McBride, as a concept, already exists in our collective societal brain. (If you're looking for the obligatory Kenny Powers mention, it’s already over.) This isn’t a fame issue, though.

Celebrities turning to fiction may be a fun recent https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/13/keanu-and-co-how-celebrities-became-bestselling-novelists">micro-trend which the publishing industry is using to provide something of a higher audience baseline, but it is historically a pretty normal endeavor.

David Duchovny cranked out Bucky F*cking Dent in 2016, and Carrie Fisher gifted us Postcards From the Edge three decades before that, and somewhere in the middle Hugh Laurie wrote The Gun Seller, or rather, as his most https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/12/france-hugh-laurie-house-novel">devout readers know it, Tout Est Sous Contrôle.

No, the circle I struggled to square is that this is a book that, in many instances, feels like it was written by somebody with clear talent who recognized that writing a book is simply a thing they can do.

It’s not laziness, to be clear: The stories here do not read like recycled character sketches from a writer’s room scratch pad.

You can hear in McBride's book https://www.theringer.com/2026/06/23/books/danny-mcbride-interview-short-story-collection-masculinity">press https://www.npr.org/player/embed/nx-s1-5877827/nx-s1-mx-5877827-1">tour that he wanted these short stories to exist as short stories.