Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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This one was mysterious and disturbing

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

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My book club was looking for something short (because we were all feeling lazy), and we somehow came up with We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) by Shirley Jackson. I was informed that I must know Jackson from the short story The Lottery, which I must have read in high school. They didn’t believe me when I said I hadn’t read it. And when I actually read The Lottery, I was still sure I hadn’t read it in high school. The Lottery is a very disturbing short story where the village commits a […]

He was just tight enough and just familiar enough with the house to be able to go out in the kitchen alone, apparently to get ice, but actually to sober up a little; he was not quite enough of a friend of the family to pass out on the living-room couch.

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

The Witchcraft of Salem Village by Shirley Jackson

Virgins by Diana Gabaldon

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The Lottery – 5/5 Stars This remains one of my favorite books ever, and is one of the very best story collections (published as a collection) that I’ve ever read to.  These stories hang on to each other so well, and there’s a few stories with lightness and levity (like “Charles” obviously, but also “The Witch”) and the obvious and patently sinister ones like “The Lottery” as well as the ones where the sinister edge cuts through only at the margins almost illegibly so. I […]

I do not now have the slightest understanding of the events which got us out of one big white house which we rented into another, bigger white house which we own, at least in part.

Raising Demons by Shirley Jackson

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This is the follow up memoir by Shirley Jackson and published in 1957. It takes places a few years after the previous book Life Among the Savages  and adds I think a deeper analysis of domestic life, and more importantly a whole host of memorable children, dogs and cats to the mix. From the first book, you might already know the story “Charles” which Jackson published separately and in the The Lottery collection. From there, Laurie is now at the end of fifth grade, a little league […]

A Quaint and Curious Volume

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

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Subtlety isn’t really what I’m looking for when it comes to books about possessed buildings trying to drive their occupants crazy.  But that’s exactly what Shirley Jackson offers in the psychological horror classic The Haunting of Hill House. The book, which is the basis of a recent Netflix series, follows four strangers brought together by a strange, old mansion. Dr. John Montague has been looking for an opportunity to conduct serious research into unexplained phenomena for a long time. He hires young bohemian Theodora and […]

Short story review dump (Part I)

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami

Mastiff by Joyce Carol Oates

A Village After Dark by Kazuo Ishiguro

King of the Elves by Philip K Dick

The Second Bakery Attack by Haruki Murakami

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So I was nerding out a couple weeks ago, and started another database. This time, I wanted to compile a list of all the stories written by as many well-regarded authors as I could think of. It started off with just novels, but quickly grew to include short stories. Which means the database got out of control pretty quickly. I knew that many (most?) authors publish a lot of short stories – but when you actually see them all lined up….. It made me realize […]



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