Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Sleepy short stories

In the Teeth of the Evidence by Dorothy L. Sayers

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In the Teeth of the Evidence is a collection of Dorothy L. Sayers’ short mystery/ detective stories, a number of which feature her best known detectives, Lord Peter Wimsey and Montague Egg, and the rest of which are stand alone tales.  I took a Detective Fiction class way back in college, so I had some name recognition for Sayers, but I couldn’t have told you much about her work.  This novel brought some of that information back to me- Wimsey and Egg are detectives from […]

A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, ‘the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.

House of the Sleeping Beauties by Yasunari Kawabata

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This is a short collection of stories by the Nobel Prize winning Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata who I have previously read and reviewed his novel The Master of Go and another collection of stories. These stories are curious, and a little forgettable, and maybe that’s in part because the opening novella is both disturbing and unsatisfying. It will ultimately probably not stand the test of time because the ideas explored in it are both a little played out, but also gauche in their presentation. An […]

In a Galaxy Far Far Away

Burning Chrome by William Gibson

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William Gibson’s Burning Chrome is a collection of 12 science fiction short stories that were written in the late 70s and early 80s and have been published together.  I would almost certainly never have picked up this book on my own- it joined my book collection after being abandoned by an old roommate, who had herself picked it for a college Science Fiction Literature class (which hints at how long this book has been knocking around my apartment).  Despite this not being my usual jam, […]

I Don’t Know What to Say

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

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This book floored me the other day. First off, thanks to Pajiba for highlighting this book in it’s best of the bunch year for 2018. The Best and Worst of Cannonball 10 article had this book as the best by Mrs. Smith Reads. It looked interesting based on her description, “Carmen Maria Machado’s collection of short stories is nothing short of perfection, and brings everything I was looking for in a year of reading mostly feminist, female-identified, and woman-positive fiction writers.” That sounded right up my alley […]

CBRBingo – The Collection. Stark, Interesting, Confusing (so, T.C. Boyle)

The Relive Box and Other Stories by T.C. Boyle

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CBR Bingo – The Collection   Short stories have recently become one of my favorite genres to tackle. There is something delightful about being able to, in one short sitting, devour a whole tale, a microcosm of a world and characters as a quick bite. Certainly this taps into my need for achievement, checking something off the never-ending to do list: progress is charted quickly and swiftly. Also, I have a bit of a reverence for short story authors, for how they are able to […]

“I took a step toward her. ‘It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,’ I said.” (CBR11Bingo)

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

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Her Body and Other Parties is all about expectations – both the ones on the page for the characters Machado created and for the reader as they come to the much hyped but little described work. I knew going in that the book was pushing boundaries, igniting conversations (the husband stitch, for example), and refused to stick to one genre at any given time, let alone for the entire collection. Having completed the book I understand why reviewers have, one the whole, been relatively mute […]



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