“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
“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, author of What The World Will Look Like When All The Water Leaves Us
From Jason Cook, publisher: In the 34 stories filling The Orange Suitcase, Joseph Riippi packs an intimate and powerful portrait of one young man’s life. From a childhood spent snipering neighbors with BB guns to an adulthood grasping after love and art in New York City, The Orange Suitcase shows us not only the way life is lived, but—perhaps more importantly—the way it is remembered.
Nicolle Elizabeth at Dactyl Review
Zach Fichel at Prick of the Spindle
Molly Gaudry reviews at Big Other
Amber Sparks reviews at Big Other
Nancy Freund reviews at Necessary Fiction
Marc Schuster reviews at Small Press Reviews
Spencer Dew reviews at decomP magazinE
Read an excerpt at Everyday Genius.
Advance praise for The Orange Suitcase
“The orange suitcase…becomes an abiding metaphor for the collection as a whole–ungainly but earnest and, in the end, charming.”
“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, author of Say, Poem
“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, author of How They Were Found
“One of the great things about [The Orange Suitcase] is the way that is accumulates through fragments and glimpses and flashes of story until the reader has constructed an entire implied narrative in their own brain.”
- Michael Kimball, author of Dear, Everybody
“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 Magazine
