Orange Suitcase

Fiction. In the thirty-four 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.

"The orange suitcase...becomes an abiding metaphor for the collection as a whole--ungainly but earnest and, in the end, charming."
-Publishers Weekly

"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

"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.

Joseph Riippi's writing has appeared in BOMB's Word Choice, The Brooklyn Rail, PANK, Everyday Genius, elimae, Bitter Oleander, Salamander, and many others. He is the author of the novel DO SOMETHING! DO SOMETHING! DO SOMETHING! (Ampersand Books, 2009) and the short story collection THE ORANGE SUITCASE (Ampersand Books, 2011). RESEARCH: A Novel for Performance is currently in development with The Claque in New York City for production in late 2011. TREESISTERS, a 24-part poem, will be published by Greying Ghost Press in 2012. He lives with his wife in New York City.