Shit Cassandra Saw

passage to the underworld, a buried treasure, a colony of fairies-anything but dirt. It is essential that they will never succeed, never dig up the boulder, and of course they don't. Their plastic shovels move the dirt aside; new dirt, dusty and thin, blows across their eyes. One of the girls becomes an engineer. One is raped by her college boyfriend. This second girl will run a bakery on an island where she loves to hike. She will have three children, all boys, and she will die when she is quite old and quite unwilling to go. Her boys will have lives too. Everyone does. Lives on fast forward, on silent, even the best life, even her own, swiftly boring.

Cassandra is tired of running at wooden horses with nothing but the flame of the smallest match.

She is tired of speaking to listening ears. The listening ears of the men who think her mad drive her to madness. She wishes she could move far away to an island and own a bird. She will never do this because she knows she never does. It is said that Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy-this is true. It is said that, when she refused his advances, he spit in her mouth so that she would never again be believed. A virgin the same as a seduced woman the same as a violated woman the same as a willing woman, all women opening their mouths to watch snakes slither out and away.

Cassandra is done, full the fuck up, soul weary.

Still, as Troy is sacked, as she clings to the cold marble legs of the statue of Athena in the sacred temple, she cannot accept what she knows to be true. That soon, Ajax will arrive and rape her. He will smash the statue of the goddess she worships and curse his own life; and worse, her goddess will not help her, will turn her shattered face away. Cassandra will be carried across the sea, made another man's concubine, bear twin boys, and be killed by Clytemnestra. But before this comes to pass, there are visions Cassandra burns to share with the women of Troy.

The women of Troy might listen. They know tha

Bookpage *Starred Review*

"Remarkable...Wielding humor and shock, Kirby audaciously unmasks gender disparity with delightful, disturbing aplomb."
--Shelf Awareness

[An] explosive, original, fearless, funny, on-the-money feminist story collection that delivers.
Publishers Weekly, Open Book

As fun as it is furious, Shit Cassandra Saw rewrites womanhood with a cast of complex, contradictory, brave and bonkers heroines as likely to skewer you with a cutlass as they are to poorly re-tile your bathroom. I want to be friends with all of the women in this collection who refuse to be anything other than exactly who they are. A barnburner of a book that will set you ablaze with its clear-eyed brilliance.
Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
 
Shit Cassandra Saw is a readable and unflinching book about womanhood in the modern world. The stories in this collection are fierce yet playful, like the characters themselves, and I read along in a fugue state of gleeful panic. Gwen E. Kirby takes readers into a funhouse of the mundane, revealing the excitement, possibility, and pure fun that lives just behind the predictable man's world we already know.
Liv Stratman, author of Cheat Day

Radiant truths are arrived at raucously in Shit Cassandra Saw, Gwen E. Kirby s spirited debut story collection. Kirby writes with deadpan humor about louts and witches and cross-dressing pirates, gods and ghosts and whores in wildly entertaining stories that swerve into wisdom and deeply satisfy.
Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood
 
The stories in Shit Cassandra Saw strike fast and leave you humming in their mysteries. Gwen E. Kirby has written a book that boldly defies categorization, much like the women at its center. Here is a writer who is too good to tell a story just one way. I ll follow Kirby s mind anywhere.
Simon Han, author of Nights When Nothing Happened