THE ORANGE SUITCASE, by joseph riippi
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In the 34 stories filling THE ORANGE SUITCASE, Joseph Riippi packs an intimate and powerful portrait of a young man’s life. From a childhood spent snipering neighbours with BB guns, to adulthood grasping at love and art in New York City, THE ORANGE SUITCASE shows us not only the way life is lived but – perhaps more importantly – how it is remembered. |
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Somethings About The Orange Suitcase
"A journey through familiar time and space, a distance marked not by roadside attractions but by the tangible objects of the narrator’s past. Riippi lifts these objects out of the daily clutter, then lights and colors them anew, invoking their long-held power to contain the persons they once belonged to."
-- Matt Bell, How They Were Found.
"From fragmentary childhood recollections Riippi construes a narrative in which figures of memory and dream cleave, in which elision supplants illusion as the engine of meaning."
-- BOMB
"Joseph Riippi manages to reveal those sublime, often subtle details we all too often ignore. He takes moments and turns them into monuments and does so with such an intimacy you don’t want the book to end. "
-- Roxane Gay, coeditor of PANK
"In Joseph Riippi’s The Orange Suitcase, the fragments come together to create a mesmerizing whole. The fictional world Riippi creates is visceral and vivid, a kind of rabbit hole the reader descends into and is reluctant to leave. A wonderful collection from a deeply talented writer."
-- Laura van den Berg,
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
"“With Do Something! Do Something! Do Something! Joseph Riippi showed he can tell a brilliant story and invent haunting characters. Now he unpacks The Orange Suitcase to show how, in short sections, he can stretch out an artful life with sensitivity and depth. There is Something About This Book. "
-- Adam Robinson, Say, Poem
A Little Something
Reviews
I want to take these short pieces — these “somethings” as the author calls them — and plaster them all over my quiet suburban town: staple them to tree trunks and telephone poles, stuff them in mailboxes, trap them beneath the windshield wipers of strangers’ cars. I want to share the work of Joseph Riippi with the world, want to show the world what writing can do, what writers can do, how well-wrought prose can make good neighbors of us all” – Marc Schuster, Small Press Reviews
As an extended poem, a lovely little book to tuck in a bag for the train ride, this is wonderful. It is a very New York story in that respect, or New York set of stories… woven together in fits and starts, with honking and engines revving, quite dense at times, but ultimately not covering a whole lot of geography.” – Nancy Freund, Necessary Fiction
The Orange Suitcase is a perfect title for this perfectly constructed book. The reader is packed up by author Joseph Riippi and whisked off on a journey, not through places but through lives–and through objects and connections gathered and treasured and sometimes broken in the duration.” – Amber Sparks, Big Other
Both narrative and lyric, thematically climactic though lacking a larger story arc, this may be a small book, but it is written with so much heart.” – Tracy O’Neill, Emprise Review
