Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Finally getting through a few story collections I have been picking at and one brand new one.

American Gothic Tales; American Supernatural Tales; Her Body and Other Parties; Honeydew by Joyce Carol Oates; ST Joshi; Carmen Maria Machado; Edith Pearlman

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American Gothic Tales – Ed. Joyce Carol Oates 5/5 Stars Joyce Carol Oates knows her stuff. Her introduction to this collection her focus on the Gothic as the selection process makes this an incredibly satisfying collection because it’s not all one type of story. So while on the one had you do in fact get a bunch of ghost stories, you also get stories that are eerie or disturbing or full of murder, and you get stories that are off-putting but not directly scary stories, […]

Ugh Part two

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This is also not a very good play at all. Here’s the setup…..a head of research institute is farcically driven. He’s got a daughter who wants to eschew college to be an actor and a son who wants to drop out of college and might be a rapist. David Schwimmer plays the maybe rapist. But it’s ok, you guys, it’s a comedy. It’s every so slightly better than the other play of hers I read. But it’s not good. What do you think goes through […]

Ugh and slightly less Ugh

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The Truth-Teller: Joyce Carol Oates is not a playwright. And I mean this, after listening to two of her plays. These are both really really bad. There’s kind of a long history of established writers working in different fields. Find a successful novelist who has written a ton of work and then see if they don’t have their “poetry” phase. It’s usually very bad. There’s plenty of writers who are able to work in multiple media, but I think when someone excels at the hardest […]

The title makes me want to hate this.

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I don’t know if I trust Joyce Carol Oates. This collection of short stories was better than the title of the title story made it seem like it should. One of the issues that made me distrustful in general is that this collection had a “theme” to it, that is Tales of Suspense. But in reality the stories were better than that made it seem like they might be. So of the stories, several stood out as being fairly strong. The opening story “Hi How […]

I miss you, Secretariat.

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Two or three years ago, while we were on vacation in The Berkshires, we spent a day at the Norman Rockwell museum. It was great. We learned a ton about Rockwell and his life and walked around the gorgeous property where he painted. As an added bonus, there was a special exhibit on display, featuring all (or at least a lot) of Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod paintings. This was particularly eye-opening, as I really didn’t know much about Hopper other than that he painted Nighthawks. […]

The adventures of Daddy and his Little Puss

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I love the concept of Joyce Carol Oates. I mean first of all the name! What a splendid name, intricate, commanding with a rhythm like a poem. Joyce Carol Oates cannot be anything other than a writer. And she churns out novels like she’s a novel factory turning sausages into full-blown novels over and over, doesn’t matter what genre, Joyce makes the sausage! But I didn’t like little bird of heaven. In fact it is my first DNF – something I did not anticipate after […]



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