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Stories
by Gwen E. Kirby
Book Reviewed by:Margaret Atwood meets Buffy in these funny, warm, and furious stories of women at their breaking points, from Hellenic times to today.
Cassandra may have seen the future, but it doesn't mean she's resigned to telling the Trojans everything she knows. In this ebullient collection, virgins escape from being sacrificed, witches refuse to be burned, whores aren't ashamed, and every woman gets a chance to be a radioactive cockroach warrior who snaps back at catcallers. Gwen E. Kirby experiments with found structures--a Yelp review, a WikiHow article--which her fierce, irreverent narrators push against, showing how creativity within an enclosed space undermines and deconstructs the constraints themselves. When these women tell the stories of their triumphs as well as their pain, they emerge as funny, angry, loud, horny, lonely, strong protagonists who refuse to be secondary characters a moment longer.
From "The Best and Only Whore of Cym Hyfryd, 1886" to the "Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories," Kirby is playing and laughing with the women who have come before her and they are telling her, we have always been this way. You just had to know where to look.
The speculative stories tend to be built on gimmicks, to varying degrees of success. One of the best of these stories is "Mary Read Is a Crossdressing Pirate, the Raging Seas, 1720," which does not lean on a comical title or absurdist setup, but simply and movingly narrates the experiences of an 18th century English woman who lived as a man and joined a crew of pirates. Still stronger are the stories grounded in reality, with more heart and less humor. "Mt. Adams at Mar Vista" revolves around a high school softball game in which the visiting team, Mt. Adams, wrestles with their complicated feelings about playing a team where a school shooting has just occurred. Humor and pathos are combined effectively in "Here Preached His Last," a story about a woman who is having an affair because she feels unfulfilled...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
One of the stories in Gwen E. Kirby's collection Shit Cassandra Saw is written in the voice of Mary Read, also known as Mark Read, an English woman who often lived as a man and sailed the seas as a pirate. Little is known for certain about Read — much of what is said about her is taken from Captain Charles Johnson's book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724), most of which is believed to be apocryphal. According to Johnson, Read's mother was married to a sailor with whom she had a son. Both her husband and her son died, and she dressed Mary, whom she had out of wedlock with another man, as her dead half-brother so she could receive an inheritance from her former mother-in-law.
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A "boisterous and high-spirited debut" (Kirkus starred review), named one of the Most Anticipated Books for Brittle Paper, The Millions, and The Rumpus, penned by a finalist for the AKO Caine Prize.
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood
Radiant truths are arrived at raucously in Shit Cassandra Saw, Gwen E. Kirby's spirited debut story collection. Kirby writes with deadpan humor about louts and witches and cross-dressing pirates, gods and ghosts and whores in wildly entertaining stories that swerve into wisdom and deeply satisfy.
