Curses, Chandeliers, Looking Alive
Staff Review Round-up, 4/11/2018
Welcome to Literati Bookstore’s round-up of recent staff favorites, and an occasional place for useful links and news from around the literary web regarding upcoming events at the store.
American by Day, by Derek B. Miller
With this, his third novel, Miller completes a literary hat trick. He’s one of my favorite contemporary writers, consistently creating novels that are at once entertaining and provocative. Here, Sigrid, the Norwegian detective who worked the case in Miller’s first book, Norwegian by Night (you don’t need to read it first, but read it you should), travels to the U.S. to locate her missing brother. The book is graced with witty, intelligent characters who seem to live and breathe on the pages (such as the New York sheriff who is also a graduate of a Jesuit divinity school), with humorous and insightful observations about contemporary life (here, drawing contrasts between American and Norwegian life), and a plot line that tackles the issue of race (here, through fatal shootings in both in Norway and in upstate New York of non-Caucasians, by white cops). In the end, my love for this book is about sentences such as this: “The heart is one of the few places where facts and truth may be separable.” — Jeanne
Look Alive Out There, by Sloane Crosley
Sloane Crosley is such a breath of fresh air. I am a masochist in my reading habits: I tend towards the dark and dreary and find it hard to get into anything much more lighthearted. Enter Look Alive Out There, a book that insists on pulling me out of my [dis]comfort zone, into a world of fun-poking and deep belly laughter: the essay in which she climbs a mountain in Ecuador is truly one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. This is the most fun I’ve had with a book in a long time. — Claire
The Chandelier, by Clarice Lispector
This new translation has got to be one of the most vital and lyrical of Lispector’s novels. The Chandelier, her second novel, pulses with a sensual exploration of consciousness (Virginia, the young protagonist, plunges her hands into riverbed clay with such immersive conviction that I feel compelled to sign up for a pottery class). Here, Lispector’s quest for “pure is” takes shape in the space of ordinary days — the heady rush of fainting, the childhood desire to create new worlds and languages, the “almost anxious…shiny, sweet swirl” of radically distilled perception and looped memory. Ever gotten an insistently clear, half-drunk notion to throw a dinner roll out of a window at a particularly boring party you’ve been dragged to? You know what I mean, then. — Gina
The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater: Essays on Crafting, by Alanna Okun
I simply could not put this collection of essays down. This collection is a love/hate letter to a passion that drives one to swear and cause non-crafters to swoon. Written with sharp, funny wit and heartfelt moments of love and loss, this true page-turner will have you soon curling up with your knitting with her stories echoing in your mind between the stitches. — Shannon
The Wild Birds, by Emily Sterlow
See her in store on May 3rd, at 7pm!
The sudden, inevitable cruelties of the natural world beat against improbable but glorious forgiveness as we read the storms and seasons of the lives of a lineage of incredible women of the West. Strelow’s writing is most ecstatic when describing the wild: a blue-gray rabbit, the perilous cliffs of the Farollon islands, a patch of thimbleberries in an Oregon forest’s understory, a harrier bird soaring overhead. O, the Golden West! Strelow had my heart on the first page’s description of the Pacific Ocean’s magnificence: “Beating hearts are mapped by this longing for the infinite.” — Gina
Where the Line Bleeds, by Jesmyn Ward
One of Jesmyn Ward’s greats, this novel consistently ignored my predictions. When I thought the characters were headed one direction, they consistently went another. Masterfully written Southern imagery, cognizant of Faulkner, combined with the realities of 2008’s economic insecurity, the dying Black communities of the past century, and overall mistrust of institutions — all in the eyes of twin eighteen-year-old black boys. More importantly, Ward perfectly captures the dread of seeing abusers once escaped. Immensely relatable and driving. I will forever need a Jesmyn Ward novel. — Ashley
