Shit Cassandra Saw
Stories
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“Kirby has mastered the art of short fiction…A stunning collection from a writer whose talent and creativity seem boundless.”
—NPR
“Kirby takes joy in subverting the reader’s expectations at every turn. Her characters might be naïve, even reckless, but they aren’t about to be victims: They’re strong, and brave, and nearly always capable of rescuing themselves.”
—New York Times Book Review
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kirby's excellent debut collection follows a series of women empowered by new circumstances, sometimes with fantastical results. In "A Few Normal Things That Happen a Lot," a man tells a woman to smile, and she responds by revealing a mouthful of fangs, which she uses to bite off the man's hand, "crack the bones and spit them out." Another woman in the same story uses her "laser eyes" to transform a man who gropes her into the exact change for her bus fare. In "The Best and Only Whore of Cwm Hyfryd, 1886," the women of a Welsh settlement in Patagonia are generally too tired to have sex with their husbands, leaving the job to a sex worker. That woman, meanwhile, writes letters home to her brother and pretends to be married. The prose is sharp and calibrated to suit each of Kirby's temporally and geographically diverse settings. She is even able to wring pathos from a story written in the format of a Yelp review, narrated by one of the rare male voices in the book, in the very funny "Jerry's Crab Shack: One Star," in which reviewer Gary F.'s account of a miserable night at the Crab Shack slips into a chronicle of his crumbling marriage. It's all accomplished through risk-taking and assured, well-developed craft. This is remarkable.
