The Best Books That Didn’t Make Our Other Lists
The Ribbon’s Year in Review 2017
The Ribbon presents a series of year-in-review content: best-sellers, staff picks, gust picks, and more. We celebrate the year that was in books, and hopefully provide you with some handy guides to navigate your holiday shopping. This list includes a selection of Literati staff favorites not featured on our other lists; featuring mostly books published in 2017 (and a few of 2016). These titles may be sleepers, or award-winners you’ve somehow yet to come across, but all are loved by our booksellers — so we don’t want you to miss them. Entries are presented in alphabetical order by author’s last name. Click the title to be directed to our online store and purchase the title directly from Literati!
The Relive Box, by T.C. Boyle
In his latest collection of short stories, Boyle successfully throws his readers head first into Kafka-esque worlds each more absurd than the last, yet disturbingly normal. His characters often attempt to cope with these nonsensical, suddenly paranormal worlds with exceptional psychological realness — self-absorption, or humorous disaffection. These are stories I’ve thought about weeks after reading, with new realizations. Fans of Boyle won’t be disappointed. — Ashley
Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943–1983, by Robert Bresson, translated by Anna Moschovakis
“I’m trying to speak cinema in a language all its own.” The lively, moving conversations of collected here, which span the auteur’s fifty-year career, chronicle the ways Bresson has forged that language: by rejecting conventional narrative, by only hiring non-professional actors, by focusing not on images but “relationships between images.” From these interviews emerges a portrait of a man dedicated (for better or worse) to the restrictions and convictions he felt he needed in order to make something truthful. At a moment when the best visual storytelling has migrated from film to television (a trend Bresson predicted almost sixty years ago!), it is heartening to spend time with someone who believed, even during film-making's artistic peak, that there was still so much left to discover. “The cinema is immense,” Bresson reminds us. “We haven’t done a thing.” — Sam
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, by Jessica Bruder
Untold numbers of poor Americans, many of them seniors, are now living in run-down vans and campers, bunking at one week and out public campgrounds, Walmart parking lots, and even suburban streets. White vans are their camouflage. Often the consequence of bad investments and foreclosures, or ill-considered loans to family members, there is nothing romantic about this life on the road. Author Bruder gets to know and travel with people who do seasonal work in Amazon warehouses (branded “CamperForce”), and the privatized and poorly paid campground jobs at state parks. She even takes a job with migrant farm workers processing sugar beets: it’s just as bad as you expect it to be. Bruder’s subjects don’t whine. They share their skills for cutting hair, small space cooking, and solar power collection. Still, you can only imagine what the people who wouldn’t talk to the author might have to say. Both disturbing and uplifting — these “workampers” are resourceful in a country that has given them less than they are owed. — Carla
Universal Harvester, by John Darnielle
Even before I ever read it in a work of fiction, perhaps there was an image in the recesses of my mind of a Chevy Caprice flipped, wrecked in the middle of an Central Iowa county highway, with its cargo — dozens, maybe hundreds of VHS tapes — strewn from the wreckage across the pavement and into the roadside ditch. This is because rural Iowa, as John Darnielle intimately understands, hums with a special kind of potential energy for the beautiful and the ominous: “Tassels rotting in October. It gets to you, if you let it.” I grew up in Iowa, renting movies from Moovies, which later changed its name into the far more straightforward Movie Gallery. Like any hometown — like, say Nevada, Iowa, where Universal Harvester’s Protagonist, 22-year-old Jeremy, resides — you long to escape, and what are movies but a temporary means? That is, until strange footage interrupts those movies — footage closer to home than you can understand, or comprehend. Darnielle’s second novel is as arresting, moving, and uncomfortable as his best work as The Mountain Goats, and just as essential a cataloging of and reckoning with rural American culture. — John
History of Wolves, by Emily Fridlund
This is an elegantly crafted novel from an exciting new voice in fiction. With psychological nuance, Fridlund examines the role intention and belief play in our lives. The narrator,, Linda, looks back at a single year in her youth, and tries to reconcile its still-lingering traumas. Adeptly, she reveals how elusive and unclear it is to decipher the intent of others. Life is a fragile balance of tenuously held ideas, where it can be difficult to separate belief from reality, desire from consequence. An eerie, haunting, and unforgettable novel. — Hilary
The Invisibility Cloak, by Fei Ge
Superficially this is the tight, tense narrative of a man (a memorably wry, irritable, borderline unlikable one) forced to take a financial and personal risk into the unknown, the criminal, and perhaps even the evil to leave behind the embarrassment of class — familial obligation, its attendant strife and disappointments, its dark histories. But what’s stunning about the novel is that the gauntlet the narrator ends up passing through is entirely real, and believable, and terrestrial even with its mysteries, absurdities, and dead-ends. It makes a lack of transcendence over, understanding of, or access to its central mysteries — common now to the high-minded noir — that much more compelling. In depth, this is a novel of sly politics and refined cultural-historical reflection, its vision is decidedly not prescriptive, its lessons refreshingly unspoken and ominous. — John
My Best Friend’s Exorcism, by Grady Hendrix
My dad taught me to enjoy one thing above all others: 80’s horror tropes. Give me your big haired, bubble gum chewing, straight-A having, possessed by the devil cheerleader and all my dreams come true. Hendrix brings it all from the glory days of cinema — the result is equal parts fun and horrifying. The mix of demons and coming-of-age story is perfection, perfect for anyone craving their next horror novel. — Atticus
American Fire, by Monica Hesse
A riveting account of a string of mysterious fires that unnerved the small communities of Accomack County, Virginia. During the six month hunt to capture the arsonist, authorities were baffled and volunteer firefighters overwhelmed. Then, on the night of the sixty-second fire, they caught the man and woman responsible. The Surprises are total: The who (which shocked and angered the community), the why (completely unexpected), Hesse’s thoroughly mesmerizing account. Much more than a timeline of events, Hesse creates a page-turning account of how this arson spree affected the tight knit communities it affected — already suffering economic decline. A deftly written, fascinating story. — Sharon
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
An Arrangement of Skin, by Anna Journey
Anna Journey’s new collection of essays, An Arrangement of Skin, sews together the patchwork of her life into an ornately recursive narrative that will sink into you. Journey explores skin as it relates to a shifting sense of self-awareness and identity. Her words shimmer with multiple meanings as she layers the textures of her personal experiences in between broader reflections of the world that surrounds us. An Arrangement of Skin is a wonderful study in introspection and self-awareness. — Charlotte
A Separation, by Katie Kitamura
Kitamura has masterfully, and with a haunting kind of precision, crafted a whip-smart and beautifully atmospheric novel of the secrets we all carry and the questions we are constantly asking. The book revolves around our unnamed narrator and protagonist and her search for husband who has gone missing on a Grecian coast that, like her marriage, has quietly burned to the ground. I was blown away by this novel and its constant, delicate simmering, every character calculating and visceral. Kitamura’s story didn’t take long to boil over and when it did, it was a fast and satisfyin0g burn. Not to be missed. — Claire
The Mortifications, by Derek Palacio
A swirling, transformative novel, possessing a narrative ground that shifts under my feet with every step I take further into the story. I love a novel that can make five years pass by in a few pages, that can make me taste both the sweetness of a tomato and the grunge of unwashed skin in the same paragraph, that transplants ghosts into tobacco leaves. That, in other words, reveals the magic and chaos of good fiction, and which, in turn, becomes the perfect vehicle to describe what is indescribable. Trauma, like the people it touches, is impossible to pin down, as is parenthood, religion, love, and death. It is lucky for us, then, that Palacio leans into this world of unknowable and uncontrollable forces like a translator who can convey even what is lost in translation. — Lillian
Don’t Call Us Dead, by Danez Smith
It isn’t always the case that a collection of poems is published and within a mere seven days the book is long-listed for the National Book Award — this is especially true when the poet is under the age of 30. All the hype set aside: this book is potent, ferocious, and acutely situated within the intersections of race, sexuality, myth, social justice, and faith. Though such a list of subjects might sound jarring or easily mismanaged, Smith’s eye for images, coupled with their ear for melodies, results in a nearly perfect orchestration of startlingly difficult, if not revelatory, themes. What if dinosaurs ran the hood? What might a paradise-after-life for all those illegally and unnecessarily slain by the police look like? Smith gives us answers to questions like these in addition to much, much more. These poems are as raw as they are masterful — they bite sharply and they soothe. — Bennet
The Book of Wonders, by Douglas Trevor
Wonderfully weird and deeply felt, this collection turns our understanding of success, connection, love, and health on its head. From the first story, “Endymion,” I knew I was in a strange world, and that I was not alone — Trevor’s characters are all at turns gobsmacked, suspicious, overcome, defeated and uplifted by their encounters with the unexpected and inexplicable. As the stories mount on top of each other they seem to be telling us that there is no right way to deal with this strange world of ours. Success stories turn banal, disruption becomes divine, a man who sleeps all day and euthanizes dogs has the sheen of a demigod, a woman trying to connect with her battle-axe mother turns therapy into a weapon. So why fight the stragness? Why fight the failtures, the opportunities and freedom it affords? Why fight for success, for its mind-numbing patterns of prizes and accolades? Strageness always turns, eventually, to wonder. — Lillian
Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, by Alice Waters
Despite having read about Alice Waters for years, I only managed to eat at her famous Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, just once: for lunch in the cafe on May 21,1983, when she may well have no longer been working in the kitchen. (With no reservations, we waited for two hours for a table.) Her career as chef was fairly short-lived, but those of restaurateur, cookbook author, and food activist, are ongoing. Coming to My Senses is about a young person finding her way in a world where sex and politics, and the role of women was a spin of the roulette wheel. Waters takes us up to the opening of her restaurant in 1971, and not much beyond. Readers will want to compare this to Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me With Apples and Tender at the Bone. Waters is too modest to belong in the pantheon of great memoir writers — this is more a perfect peach fondly remembered than an elaborate tasting menu — but her place in the pantheon of great Americans is assured. — Carla
