Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Some Award Nominees and other books

Maria Maria and Other Stories by Marytza K. Rubio

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

Shutter by Ramona Emerson

The Bird Catcher by Gayl Jones

The Shadow Puppet by Georges Simenon

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Maria Maria and other stories – 3/5 I picked up this book because it was nominated for the National Book Award, and it reminds me of how dubious I often am of story collections being nominated for fiction prizes that should probably go to novels. This is a perfectly good collection of stories, with some stories really standing out like the opening story in which a witch is dealing with a troublesome class of new students in a college witching class. Other stories that stand […]

The Healing

The Healing by Gayl Jones

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CBR14Bingo – Star The star here is in reference to our narrator’s work as a manager for a contemporary rock and roll singer, the ways in which this relationship shapes the narrative, and the discussion is elicits.   Gayl Jones tips her hand late in this book when one character calls our narrative a “picara”/. In doing so, we learn what we need to know about our narrator and what to do with the Quixotic and episodic novel. If you’ve read Gayl Jones’s first two […]

Corregidora – Gayl Jones (1975)

Corregidora by Gayl Jones

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I connect this book to Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred for a couple of reasons. For one, they’re both published by Blue Streak, with these stark cover and similar covers. So that’s a shallow reason, but it plants the seed in my mind for how they’re alike. Both books are also written in the 1970s, by Black women, and deal with a contemporary (or recent contemporary for Gayl Jones’s book) displacement and a deep discomfort with the past, especially the racial and genetic past of the […]



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