Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Being from Paris means filing her nails to a point and lacquering them to Hemorrhage Red.

The Strange Case of Rachel K by Rachel Kushner

by Leave a Comment

Also, $20 will buy you this book. This is a tiny hardback edition of three mediocre short stories. They are called “pieces” in this collection, but don’t let that fool you. They are stories, and they are utterly derivative, forgettable, and affected. I have to admit that Rachel Kushner has long been on my list of suspected con-artists when it comes to contemporary fiction. And for once, I don’t think this is a case of being out of my element or not being attuned to […]

My first Must Read of 2019

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

by 3 Comments

Y’all, this book was amazing. I could not put it down, I utterly devoured it. Maybe I’m just obsessed with the setting of a women’s prison (I’m still fully on board the Orange is the New Black train) but like this book got me. It is so mind-bendingly good, y’all. Disjointed storytelling is a technique that fails more often than it works, but when it works (and it does here) it is outrageously engrossing. The book starts with our narrator being moved to her new prison where […]

What I eventually came to understand, about San Francisco, was that I was immersed in beauty and barred from seeing it

by Leave a Comment

I gave this novel a shot, but I ended up liking it less and less as I went on. At first, it reminded me a lot of Mary Gaitskill, and you could do worse than sounding like a Mary Gaitskill (luckily we can just go read Mary Gaitskill novels). But then I couldn’t help feel like the novel was trying to tell me how smart it was and how much it knew. But the thing is, it doesn’t know that much. This is basically a […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo