num_pages: 274
description: Margaret Atwood meets Buffy in these funny warm and furious stories of women at their breaking points from Hellenic times to today.Cassandra may have seen the future but it doesn't mean she's resigned to telling the Trojans everything she knows. In this ebullient collection virgins escape from being sacrificed witches refuse to be burned whores aren't ashamed and every woman gets a chance to be a radioactive cockroach warrior who snaps back at catcallers. Gwen E. Kirby experiments with found structures--a Yelp review a WikiHow article--which her fierce irreverent narrators push against showing how creativity within an enclosed space undermines and deconstructs the constraints themselves. When these women tell the stories of their triumphs as well as their pain they emerge as funny angry loud horny lonely strong protagonists who refuse be secondary characters a moment longer. From The Best and Only Whore of Cym Hyfryd 1886 to the Midwestern Girl [who] is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories Kirby is playing and laughing with the women who have come before her and they are telling her we have always been this way. You just had to know where to look.
language: English
title: Shit Cassandra Saw
publisher: Penguin Books