Death by a Thousand Cuts by Shashi Bhat

A Short Fiction Collection Review by Naomi MacKinnon

The stories in Death by a Thousand Cuts are devastating, funny, and completely accessible. She makes reading feel easy and then drops a thought bomb on you that makes you realize how intentionally crafted these stories are.

In Dealbreaker, Asha is trying to find a partner through online dating but has had no success. She wonders if she's being too picky. She wishes she didn't feel the need for a partner, but "a relationship is the last want she has left. A want carved to so fine a sliver it has turned into a need." Asha has "vowed" to no longer judge people based on: "choice of hygiene products, use of a too-frequent catchphrase, having a very long beard, not having a beard, not owning a bedframe, owning a matching bedroom set inherited from his parents, disorganized storage of video-game controllers, storage of all kitchen utensils in one uncompartmentalized drawer."

In the very next story, Death By a Thousand Cuts, the narrator has a perfectly good partner, but she's just not feeling it. She's trying. But she might just have a very legitimate reason for feeling off. And it's not the fact that he has webbed toes. It has more to do with his recessive blue-eye gene.

In Chicken and Egg, a woman loses her hair; the one trait she has that she considers beautiful. "To you, a hundred still seems like a lot... And there are now more than a hundred strands of hair on your bedroom carpet, and more coiled in the drain, and more nesting in your hairbrush like strange dark birds."

In Her Ex Writes a Novel, a woman discovers that she has been written about in her ex's debut novel. She wonders if she should read it. She refuses to buy it but will get it from the library as soon as it comes out. She sees a preview of the novel on Google Books, and it includes a sex scene with her in it and another scene where she is saying mean things to him. What is she going to do about this?!

"When a man depicts his girlfriend as angry, why does nobody ask what it was that made her that way?"

Other stories in this collection include a young woman afraid of getting stuck in the wrong life; a woman whose personality changes after suffering from an oil burn to her face; a woman who is alone during the pandemic because of her autoimmune disease; and a woman who wonders if she's the asshole in the relationship for not wanting her partner to grab at her whenever he feels like it.

"Sometimes I think the hardest thing about being alive is that we can ever really know ourselves."

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About the Author

SHASHI BHAT is the author of the story collection Death by a Thousand Cuts, and the novels The Most Precious Substance on Earth, a finalist for the Governor General's Award for fiction, and The Family Took Shape, a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Her fiction has won the Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and appeared in such publications as The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Stories, and The Journey Prize Stories. Shashi holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and a BA from Cornell University. She lives in New Westminster, B.C., where she is the editor-in-chief of EVENT magazine and teaches creative writing at Douglas College.

About the Reviewer

Naomi MacKinnon lives in Nova Scotia with her husband, three kids, a dog, three cats, and a bunny. She works in the children's department at the beautiful Truro Public Library where she loves to read all the picture books and play with the puppets. She blogs about (mostly) Canadian and Atlantic Canadian books at Consumed by Ink. 

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ McClelland & Stewart (April 30 2024)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 216 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0771095112

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0771095115