Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Genre: Short Stories

Hero School Shenanigans

My Hero Academia: School Briefs (v4) by Kohei Horikoshi, Anri Yoshi

by Leave a Comment

I have realized something about novelizations and short story collections based on manga/anime: I prefer the episodes that don’t refer to something directly from the main series. Just for the record, stories that started as novels and then got turned into the other forms are something else entirely, not this. This is My Hero Academia: School Briefs 4. Basically it’s a series of short stories mainly linked to episodes from the manga; at least I’m pretty sure since I’m not totally caught up with the […]

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

by Leave a Comment

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

by Leave a Comment

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

by Leave a Comment

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

by Leave a Comment

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 […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo
  3. Google Pay