three books, including the award-winning children’s book National Monuments of the U.S.A. and the debut short story collection How to Capture Carbon.
At Electric Lit Walker tagged eight books of
Kitchen Surrealism or perhaps Domestic Fantastic for the charming consonance. Stories of this type can interweave fairytale with fixing a broken faucet, or find the uncanny in untangling the box of charger cords (one of my least favorite tasks), or tell a ghost story in which the haunting is less about horror and more of a way to understand the world of the living.One title on Walker's list:
Housekeeping by Marilynne RobinsonRead about another entry on the list.
“Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me,” Marilynne Robinson said in an interview with the Paris Review. In her first novel, Housekeeping, the numinous shines through the ironing, tidying, sewing, and scrubbing that several generations of a family of women do to hold on to their home and to each other after a series of losses in the town of Fingerbone. The rhythm of daily tasks feels like a charm that two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, use to ward off further disaster, and run counterpoint to Ruth’s growing connection to the more dream-like world of her unusual aunt. For me, the novel is less about whether the choice to lean into routine or into the unknown is the right one, but about the courage to continue living, day by day.
Housekeeping is among four books that changed Karen Foxlee, Yiyun Li's six favorite novels, Claire Cameron's five favorite stories about unlikely survivors, Sara Zarr's top ten family dramas, Philip Connors's top 10 wilderness books, Kate Walbert's best books, and Aryn Kyle's favorite books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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