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I'd heard a short story from this collection titled "The Present" read by David Rackoff on an episode of This American Life, and it brought me to tears. It so perfectly captures the relationship between the two main characters and describes the issue they're facing as a couple. After hearing the tale, I immediately looked the book up at my local library and put it on hold. I figured if the rest of the stories in this collection were even half of the story that "The Present" is, I'd enjoy it immensely. Unfortunately, that turned out to not be the case. At all.

I understand that in a collection of 30+ stories, they can't all be winners. But most of the stories are so sexist, they left me with an icky feeling in the pit of my stomach after reading. We've got a little girl's imaginary friend (a fully grown male goat, by the way) who kisses her without her consent and gets upset she doesn't return his feelings (ew), a man who takes his girlfriend to get "repaired" because he doesn't listen to her nor does he do nice things for her, and this upsets her (ew), a college boy who stages a campus-wide protest against a girl who won't go out with him (ew), a NASA astronaut who submits a petition to force a fellow female astronaut to sleep with him in the name of "science" (ew), a story where being in a committed relationship with a woman is compared being incarcerated (ew), and on and on and on. Here are a few quotes that really left me with a bad taste in my mouth:

The truth was, secretly, he had come to be proven right. He’d assumed that a third-party witness (particularly a male one) would take one look at the facts and declare him innocent. His girlfriend would be diagnosed with some mental problem: depression, possibly, or something menstruation-related.

“Here,�� he said, reaching into his cassock pocket. “I’m going to give you a sacred book.�� He placed a slim black volume in Will’s hands. “It’s called The Game. It teaches you how to pick up girls.��

"It's not just about Jen," he said. "It's about the entire romantic system. Ninety-nine percent of men are in love with the top one percent of women. And yet they often refuse to date us. It's a complete injustice."

Just, ew.