Because, February 1, 2014

“In Because, Joseph Riippi says he wants this book to be ‘a love letter, a prayer, a purge’ but it actually becomes even more than that. It’s a bursting-at-the-seams dream that cradles so many wishes and passions into its wide scope that it constantly surprises with unexpected turns and brilliant thoughts. It transcends its simple mantra-like structure and becomes a reverberating world of beauty and wonder.”

–Kevin Sampsell, author of This Is Between Us

“Hypnotic, magical, and experimental: Joseph Riippi’s Because will crack your heart open.”

–Chloe Caldwell, author of Legs Get Led Astray

“I’ve always liked this kind of book—the kind that treats its formal conceit not as parlor game but as quarry—and I loveBecause in particular. It is a beautiful, heartbreaking cairn built of need and desire, love and nostalgia, caprice and obsession, generosity and ambition and hope.”

–Roy Kesey, author of Any Deadly Thing

“I don’t read too many books wherein the author bares everything of himself, opens his chest and lets his innards spill out. The offal truth of Joseph Riippi’s Because stinks to high heaven with beauty. This book took me inside my own childhood, inside my relationship with my wife and my daughter, and made me want to be a better human. All this in a novel about someone else. Amazing.”

–Jamie Iredell, author of I Was A Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac

“‘I want,’ says Joseph Riippi, and begins at once to disarm and charm the reader with a series of declarative statements. This sounds simple, but it’s anything but – by the time you reach the last page of BECAUSE, you’ll realize what an intricate and beautiful building Riippi has made of human life, and how sorry you are to leave it. This inventive, heartbreaking book is a gorgeous, painfully honest examination of what it means to be a person, and I want everyone I know to read it.

–Amber Sparks, author of The Desert Places and May We Shed These Human Bodies

“The anaphoric ebb and flow of Joseph Riippi’s Because is bound to remind one of Joe Brainard’s I Remember. But while Riippi’s book is similarly incantatory and moving, it is also more wistful, more painful. There is a beautiful vulnerability in Riippi’s many wants, an aching sadness that stays with the reader.”

–Gabriel Blackwell, author of The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men