Overrated Books, Climate & Grief, Kicking Hanta out of Our Bookstore
Welcome to Carriage Return
Carriage Return is The Ribbon’s (more or less) weekly round-up of useful links from around the literary web. A reset for your week, tabs to open, and perhaps some context for your next book browsing visit, wherever you are.
Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes The Sun, out now in hardback, and this month’s pick for the Literati Feminist Book Club, spoke with Flavorwire’s Sarah Seltzer as part of their new Sweetest Debut series. One response in particular stands out:
Name a canonical book you think is totally overrated.
The Bible. I think it’s the best fiction out there, but somehow it’s often placed in the nonfiction category. It would’ve been a lot better if Eden, Ruth, Jezebel, Mary, and Mary Magdalene had chapters, too.
The rest is up here.
Michigan native and friend of the store, Margaret Hetherman, raises a question in an article for Scientific American:
The deterioration of our planet — the only home we have ever known and an assurance we used to take for granted — is bound to elicit a wide range of emotions in different individuals. Mourning is personal, but as a species, could it be that we are making our way through the stages of grief as outlined by the late Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross?
What follows is an illuminating walk through our potential collective, civilization-wide stages of grief with the help of climate activist and psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren, among others.
On the acceptance tip, one might be inclined to take a look at Roy Scranton’s book-length essay Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, a staff pick. He’ll be in store on August 22nd in support of a new novel, and The Ribbon’s feature-length interview with him discusses what that final grief stage might look like.
Literati bookseller Mairead Small Staid has an incredible narrative, travelogue, and country-music meditation up on Jezebel. If you haven’t read it yet, do so . Both Mairead and Literati co-owner Mike Gustafson were recently asked book selling questions by Catapult and the Tin House blog, respectively. If you’re in distress, even if you’re a fictional character, Mike will look after you:
THB: If you could spend the day with a character, who would it be and what would you do?
MG: I’d take my good friend Hanta — the protagonist I care about and deeply love in Too Loud A Solitude — to see a psychologist. “I’m concerned,” I’d tell him, “You’re muttering to yourself in our bookstore and, quite frankly, steal too many of our ARCs and cram them into your tiny studio apartment, and it simply doesn’t have enough room. I think you don’t realize your literary obsession will kill you, quite literally.” And he’d respond, “I can be by myself because I’m never lonely; I’m simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.” And I’d turn to the psychologist and throw my hands up and say, “See?”
As well, Literati bookseller Lillian Li has been blogging about her experiences as a store “rookie.” Michigan Quarterly Review has all three excellent installments.
Some notable books hit our shelves Tuesday — Heather Ann Thompon’s Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, for one. The New York Times calls it a “superb work of history.” She visits Literati on September 19th.
And some notable books are (always) already out. Last month Graywolf released Solmaz Sharif’s stunning LOOK (and two brief Literati staff blurbs for it can be found here). Over at Bookforum this week, Cora Currier has this review — and it brings us back to the subject of grief:
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag cautioned that we have to acknowledge the limits of our access to the pain of others, even when there is a political utility to bearing witness. In watching recent videos of police shootings and other horrifying imagery in the news, I thought of a line from Look, “grief is a CLOSED AREA.” In that brief phrase Sharif evokes the black box of inaccessible anguish, but with the authoritarian shade of “CLOSED AREA,” she reminds us of powers that would rather us not see the grief at all.
