Borders, Bones, Blood, the Fall of Adam and Eve
Carriage Return, 10/31/2017
Happy Halloween! Carriage Return is The Ribbon’s round-up of recent Literati Bookstore staff favorites, as well as an occasional place for useful links and news from around the literary web regarding upcoming events at the store.
Recent Staff Favorites (in Hardcover)
The End We Start From, by Megan Hunter
This haunting, visceral thing of a book took my breath away. Within its pages, we follow an unnamed new mother through a dystopian London under flood waters, into a newly crowded English countryside, and onto a boat that whisks us away to an island off the coast of Scotland. This is a story of a mother and her new son and the lengths to which love can go, even in the depths of such catastrophic destruction. Hunter’s prose is at once both quietly hopeful and powerfully beautiful. The End We Start From is a celebration of love and life, and of the world itself. — Claire
From Here to Eternity, by Caitlin Doughty
“All that surrounds us comes from death, every part of every city, and every part of every person.” Caitlin Doughty illustrates this truth in her exploration of death practices across the world. Part travel narrative, part sociological study, Doughty reads like a friend, gently but firmly showing us how our own Western standards/expectations for our dead are heavily biased by the funeral industry — a force that looms just outside of standard vision. Through her time observing funerary practices in Japan, Spain, Belize, and Mexico, Doughty transforms “The After” into something more fluid; exposing a porosity to death and its’ rituals that we may not have noticed otherwise. She shows us that the dead are more than we might think — that death is, indeed, everywhere. — Charlotte
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, by Stephen Greenblatt
In this all-encompassing of — what were supposedly — the first man and woman on earth, Pulitzer Prize winning author Stephen Greenblatt unpacks the birth, maturation, and inevitable death of one of humanity’s oldest and most profound origin stories. Much like his other books, Greenblatt leaves no analytical stone unturned. By seeking out and scrupulously examining the multitude of disciplinary tissues which allowed for such a tale to transcend the fictive for that of the breathing and beating flesh, Greenblatt grants us total access. Whether it be through the lens of physiological historiography, traditions in oral storytelling, a cultural study of certain writers’ adaptations (say, Milton), or observations regarding the possibility of an Eden-like space during ancient times: this book does it all. By the end, I had learned far more than I bargained for. — Bennet
The Shape of Bones, by Daniel Galera (translated by Alison Entrekin)
This vivid and moving coming of age tale is told in narratives alternating between a teen-aged Hermano, and the adult Hermano, as the latter takes a spur-of-the-moment detour from a road trip (and his life) to visit the town where he spent his youth. There, familiar surroundings trigger a flood of memories, both tender and violent, and we are placed smack-dab in the middle of the struggles of both the child to fight peer pressure during angst-ridden teenage years, and the man to come to terms with regret and deep-seeded guilt over decisions made as a child. This is a bittersweet meditation and powerful reflection on the ways in which some of our earliest of decisions haunt us throughout life. It is one man’s story of facing the past and making amends as best he can. We can’t undo the past, but we can take steps to atone, just as our bones can be broken and reset and healed. We go forward, scars and all, but we go forward. — Jeanne
Recent Staff Favorites (in Paperback)
Blood at the Root, by Patrick Phillips
Forsyth County, Georgia, just north of Atlanta, had a large African American community at the turn of the 20th Century, anchored by the strong presence of black churches. In 1912, after the rape and murder of a white girl, the whole community erupted in a frenzy of violence, lynching a black man in the town square and then hanging two black teenagers after a one-day kangaroo trail even though there was no evidence any of them were involved. Egged on by racist newspapers’ false reports of black gangs rampaging through the countryside, and aided by complicit law enforcement, white citizens of the county systematically terrorized the remaining black citizens, forcing them from their homes with arson and threats of murder. Then they took animals, crops, and land for themselves. — Deb
The Border of Paradise, by Esme Weijun Wang
This novel, described by the author as an “Immigrant Californian Gothic,” is spooky as all get out, haunted by ghostly inheritances and demonic brain sparks, and written in divine prose. Wang is a Helen Zell Writers’ Program alum and a 2017 Granta Best Young American Novelist recipient, and I’m looking forward to her upcoming essay collection out on Graywolf next year! — Gina
