Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

He found her already seated at the coffee shop.

False Bingo by Jac Jemc

Separate Hours by Jonathan Baumbach

The Suitcase by Sergei Dovlatov

Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz

The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty

Souls and Bodies by David Lodge

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False Bingo 3/5 This is a solid, weird, sometimes scary, sometimes cutting short story collection. I didn’t really like Jemc’s other novel that I read, but I generally liked these stories. The collection begins with a really funny and weird meetup in a coffeeshop that’s punchy and wry. We get some stories about seemingly haunted houses, about weird relationships. Many of the stories are quite short, but some of the longer ones really put something down that is interesting to stick around with. Two come […]

Whatever you remember about an old girlfriend is perfect.

Sam the Cat by Matthew Klam

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I told my wife I might have a little Matthew Klam narrator in me and she was horrified because she had read this book years ago and it helped her to put name and face to the phenomenon of white American men of a certain bent. These are several (fairly long) stories written clearly by a man in his 30s, looking back and thinking about men in their 20s. These men are so deeply in their 20s it’s painful and hurtful to see them acting. […]

Journalis Shtamm, whose “Letters from the Provinces” were signed “Etal,” among other pseudonyms, had decided to set out–on the heel of his letters–for Moscow.

Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

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This is a kind of paranoiac nightmare collections of Soviet fables from the 1920s written in Russian and published in the early days of the country. Recently, when I read the Nabokov uncollected nonfiction collection I was pleased to find a very grumpy and critical Nabokov being asked to review a handful of pro-Party Communist literature from the 1920s (and maybe 1930s I forget) and he hated it. The plots and examples he showed unveiled a truly disgusting, servile, craven set of literature. Imagine pro-Trump […]

While we waited we were visited by the ghosts of the girls who had already died.

The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories by Aysa Papatya Bucak

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This is a very good short story collection that came out last year. The quality comes in a lot of ways, namely that like other goof story collections there’s both a stylistic and thematically (and especially tonal) consistency among the stories here. The opening story is told in a kind of afterlife collection voice of girls who have died as a consequence of patriarchy — in a kind of displaced ahistorical way — and this narrative distance continues through almost all of the stories. We […]

“When you’re a kid, it’s hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.”

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

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Karen Russell was just 25 when this collection came out; a fact that is plastered all over the cover, festooned in blurbs throughout the opening pages, and the header on almost every piece of criticism that was launched at the same time as this collection. Her youth is/was impressive, and most certainly made me look back at my 25-year-old self with pity, but her youth is not the spark that sets this fire. She may have been young, but her ability to give voice to […]

Of course I had read Wuthering Heights.

Heathcliff Redux by Lilly Tuck

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A new and not particularly great short story collection by the National Book Award winner for her novel The News from Paraguay, which I haven’t read, so I can’t say anything about that. I picked this one up because the premise seemed interesting, and the title novella in the collection seemed to both be doing something interesting, and it takes place more or less local to where I live and parts of Virginia I am familiar with. The premise of this novella begins with a woman […]



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