Kings and Counterrevolutionaries, City Living and Division IV College Wrestling
Carriage Return, 1/23/2018
Carriage Return is a 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)
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser
I was the kid who read and re-read the Little House books. Eventually I was forbidden from discussing them at dinner tables. I also read every biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder I could find. As such, I though I knew all there was to know about her. Having now read this masterful new book, I know I was wrong. Fraser covers Laura’s later life — including her development as a writer and her relationship with her daughter Rose more thoroughly than I’ve seen anywhere else. But you don’t need to be a devoted fan to enjoy this book. Fraser does a wonderful job setting Laura’s life within the broader American historical context. Prairie Fires’ place on the New York Times’s Best 10 Books of the Year list was very well-deserved. — Jill
The King Is Always Above the People: Stories, by Daniel Alarcon
A sharp, insightful, and startling collection of stories that explore the lives of immigrants, refugees, and those in exile. These are stories about leaving home, making new homes in different lands, and the sometimes fraught experience of returning home. They are, as the New York Times wrote in their recent review, “stylistically daring” — indeed, this collection contains some of the most memorable writing and formal structuring I’ve encountered in years. The characters are vivid, the settings so alive, that the pages pulse with life. Alarcon is an exciting writer, and his latest is highly recommended. — Hilary
Stephen Florida, by Gabe Habash
Tremendous! What can I even say about a book that has swept away everything I thought a writer could do, when all my usual descriptors just seem beside the point? Can I call a narrator’s voice pitch-perfect if that pitch is nightmarish and heavenly at the same time, swerving from testosterone-heavy jock-speak to ecstatic poetry, and back in the same sentence? Can I say that I root for the unlikely hero (The eponymous Stephen, a division IV college wrestler with one last chance at the championship) when his aspirations are so pin-hole narrow that I can’t imagine what will happen to his life whether he wins or loses? And yet still, I want him to win. No, lose. No, win. And can I even describe what Habash does with the landscape of North Dakota as grindingly realistic when it is more like looking through a fun house mirror and somehow seeing things more clearly than any straightforward refelction? So what can I say? Read it, please. now. — Lillian
Recent Staff Favorites (in Paperback)
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, by Nina Riggs
Rarely does a book affect me in the way this one did. I was so totally enraptured by Rigg’s story and her gorgeous (and often funny) prose that I read it in a single sitting and never wanted it to end. A heartbreakingly beautiful look at learning to live as best as possible when faced with a daunting diagnosis, this memoir is filled with so much humor, heart, and honesty that you finish it feeling a profound sense of loss (Riggs passed away a day before the book went to press), but you also feel so lucky that she lived and created it. Read it and be changed. — Hilary
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, by Corey Robin
Good theoretical writing makes it feel like two brains are on fire in mutual excitement and discovery — the writer themselves, and the involved reader, each anticipating, together, the next turn and “a-ha!”. In The Reactionary Mind, you can almost feel Corey Robin pushing up against the limits of description as he fleshes out a deceptively simple, well-researched and sourced, and deeply novel and prescient thesis — that conservatism in theory is not an ideology but an (often desperate) disposition toward the maintenance of hierarchical power. Throughout recent history, the counterrevolutionary has needed a revolutionary with which to counterpose himself, the object of his revanche, against whom — to paraphrase Burke — he might encounter some unholy and sublime meaning. Our liberal and tried and solemn tendency today is to think of figures like Trump as breakers of sacred norms, as historically unprecedented figures, whereas Robin stunningly and in clarifying, often beautifully composed inquiry, reveals them to be not just weak but classically of the mode — as “it’s not that the counterrevolutionary is disposed to paradox; he’s simply forced to straddle historical contradictions for power’s sake.” To misapprehend the conservative and the counterrevolutionary is to lose out on both the significance and also the predictability of our present moment, and in so doing fatally misjudge the enemy and the way forward. — John
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, by Olivia Lang
I took my time with these essays, simply because they really and truly moved me. Olivia Laing meditates on pain, on loving, on cities, on loving and hating those cities, on the loneliness of being in a body. She does this through the eyes and themes of several different artists and does so with such expertise and empathy, I felt so much less alone just by reading. But I also started to feel a little better about the loneliness that is still forever embedded. It’s there, it’s a part of me, and it’s meant to be felt. This is a languorous and necessary read, one that I will revisit many times over. — Claire
