Cannonball Read 11

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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In a sense, omnipotence is a form of impotence.

Going for a Beer: Selected Short Fiction by Robert Coover

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There’s about three or four stories in this novel that function the same way as “The Babysitter”, the most famous and probably best story in this collection. This story takes place on a typical suburban night where the kids are at home with a babysitter, the mom and dad are at a neighbor’s party, and the babysitter’s boyfriend and friend are plotting to come over for some fun. But then the story slices up the various possible narrative threads and plays them all out one after another and after another. What this looks like is that as the story moves […]

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6/19/2018 | Post by

What he did not expect was to find himself standing on the night of Saturday the eighteenth—the Night, as it turned out, of the Sacrifice—in a ditch alongside the old road to Deepwater Number Nine Coalmine, watching a young girl die.

The Origin of the Brunists by Robert Coover

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This is Robert Coover’s first novel; it came out in 1966. The copy I read was pulled from the library stacks and is a first edition, with a nondescript front cover in brown, with the picture of the white bird you can see in other covers from other editions. This novel begins in a kind of present tense, seeing the quote from my title above, at what becomes a human sacrifice for a religious cult in an unnamed state, but is seemingly the coal mining country of Pennsylvania or New York. The novel begins with this scene and then goes […]

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6/4/2018 | Post by

Distantly blows are falling, something about freedom and government, but he is strolling in the garden with a teacher he once had, discussing the condition of humanity, which keeps getting mixed up somehow with homonymity, such that each time his teacher issues a new lament it comes out like slapped laughter.

Spanking the Maid; Ghost Town by Robert Coover

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Spanking the Maid – 3/5 Stars One thing I like about Robert Coover is that I take him seriously as a writer, even when he’s being hilarious. This novel isn’t exactly hilarious, though ironic, but still requires me to pay attention to his language in careful ways. The second novel I will be reviewing does so even more. This is a strange meditation on modes of power. Ostensibly it’s the day in and day out occurences in a a domestic battle between a male employer and his female maid, for whom he finds daily and escalating reasons to “spank” her […]

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5/17/2018 | Post by

Voom indeed!

The Cat in the Hat for President by Robert Coover

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This isn’t very good of a novella, but it is really funny and interesting and prescient in its way. For one thing, this was written in 1968 as a kind of farcical tale of desperate Democrat operatives looking for a way to subvert the obvious momentum of Nixon in the wake of RFK’s assassination. And so they nominate the indecipherable Cat in the Hat. And somehow Robert Coover invented Donald Trump years before the would-be shithead was still just dreaming of racially discriminating housing and sexually assaulting women and lying his way into a brain-numbing oblivion. So anyway, enjoy the […]

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5/4/2018 | Post by

The Corrupting Effects of Sivilization

Huck Out West by Robert Coover

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Do you remember how the last third of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn made you hate Tom Sawyer? Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Robert Coover takes Mark Twain’s iconic characters, ages them about 30 years, places them in Deadwood just before America’s centennial, and uses them to expose the ignorance, violence and cruelty at the heart of America’s westward expansion. If The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was mostly an adventure story for boys, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a story of the loss of innocence, Huck Out West depicts innocence as being trampled over and over again. Coover […]

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2/6/2017 | Post by


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