Music, Bunk, Idiocy, Bakkhai
Carriage Return, 1/30/2018
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)
In Every Moment We Are Still Alive, by Tom Malmquist
An autobiographical love letter written in breathless and tragic prose, this novel is as powerful and raw as it is tender and beautiful. Full of humanity and hypnotic in its telling, it is one of the best books of love, loss, resilience and hope I’ve read in a very long time. — Shannon
Bakkhai, by Euripides (translated by Ann Carson)
It’s deliciously fun, with a bit of a gruesome twist, but let us poke some holes in the uptight condemnations of toxic masculinity of yore (and today.) Picture it: Dionysius is in town, the Bakkhic babes are throwing a party, and Aphrodite counts her blessings beside the erotic sea! — Gina
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, by Kevin Young
(With a ragged boy’s newsy tonality from atop a tarnished crate) Step right up! Step right up! Behold the critically curious, the dynamically didactic, the enormously eruptive, Bunk! Written by the gentleman-whimsy-poet extraordinaire, Kevin Young, this polemic uncovers one of the oldest, truest, and grossest of U.S. traditions: “the spectacle as speculation.” Whether it be for cold hard cash, superior cultural positioning, hierarchical racial switcheroos, or just because the huckster was bored, Bunk examines how and why American hoaxes are often overtly exposed only to then become casually forgotten — outrage begets amnesia. It is in this historical under-appreciation that Young frames his argument. For as soon as we admit that a hoax is a “trick disguised as a wish,” we must then ask, but whose wish is it? — Bennet
The Idiot, by Elif Batuman
My love for this book is huge. But how to explain this love? The premise of the story is straightforward. But its appeal, perhaps, is less so: it is long and dense and, at points, totally exasperating. What I experienced, though, was a profound and intense familiarity, a story told with so much lucidity that it made my own daily experiences — banal & routine — that much more lucid. IT is the story of a girl in her freshman year at Harvard, who longs and waits for love and meaning to make themselves known to her. Full of confusion, disappointment, and unfulfilled yearning, The Idiot is also incredibly intimate and hilarious. Its greatest gift, to me, was that it filled me with the desire and clarity to write. I’ve been writing a lot since reading this book — that is the mark of my love for it. — Madison
Recent Staff Favorites (in Paperback)
Elmet, by Fiona Mozley
Dark noir, grungey, wet, often cruel pastoral England — Fiona Mosley makes you an eleven year old girl beating the shit out of four older rich boys (who started it) on a cold rocky beach — the entire time, fearing the darkening tones of where this is headed. Faulkner-like storytelling, unforgiving and beautiful, the real weight of this novel lies in its imagery.
An empty shell, lifeless, with no burrowed crustacean — constantly chipping brightly colored pain on urban things ‘not made to last’.
“Two tartan scarves, a dark green fleece and thick purple walking socks pulled over jean, fawn jodhpurs…”
“Trees with bark set hard, like scraped Kavri gum… green mosses and ivies… flood lit gymkhane…”
“Tales of green men peering from thickets with foliate faces and legs of gnarled timber.” — Ashley
Music for a Wedding, by Lauren Clark
Reading in store February 23rd!
Regardless of my circumstances — time of day, location, money, Lauren Clark’s “I See Jeff Daniels In The Street” makes me tear up every time I read it. A meditation on mistaking the beloved character actor for one’s dead father, the poem exemplifies the astonishing, devastating power for Clark’s debut. In line after line, they delve into the unsettling spaces where tenderness and violence overlap, where grief is never overcome but recast, where love’s promises often fall short but sometimes, mercifully, fulfill themselves. More than enough material for most, but this collection makes room for plenty else: Greek mythology, Kim Kardashian, Wild Bill Hickok, Eric Clapton. “I know things,” Clark writes, “that could crack hearts open like coconuts.” Believe them. — Sam
