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The
Pink Institution
Reviews
Believer Book of the Year Award Finalist
Venus Books of the Year
Weekly Gambit Top Ten Books of the Year
Venus:
“A fresh take on Southern Gothic.”
NewPages:
“Not to be missed.”
American Book Review:
“Powerful and memorable.”
New Orleans Weekly Gambit:
“Sheer power . . . this book will resonate with its readers for a long time.”
Raleigh News & Observer:
“More than the history of a family or a place, Saterstrom’s novel is about the complex ways in which people—in the South and elsewhere—are shaped by, and give shape to, their family stories. . . . Saterstrom’s fresh voice, keen vision, and exquisite, cut-to-the-quick language make the book impossible to put down.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune:
“Saterstrom’s subject matter is not new to contemporary literature—rot, drunkenness, incest and violence in the Deep South—but her innovative method makes all the heat, the bad sex and the stale booze-breath seem startlingly alive. . . . The Pink Institution is an auspicious debut by a compellingly gifted writer.”
LA Weekly:
“By turns trancey and disarmingly straightforward, Selah Saterstrom’s The Pink Institution illustrates its saga of familial pathology without dramatizing, histrionics or a drop of self-pity. . . . Like exotic artifacts from some long-destroyed civilization such as Pompeii or Troy, the remnants of the bourbon-soaked, incest-tinged, unhinged lives in the novel appear at once foreign, familiar and all too human.”
Believer:
“What sometimes seems like a projection flickering on the southeast part of the nation has another side not so brochure-ready. Grubby, wild-eyed children play on tires. Yards are speckled with a rusted symphony’s worth of shapes. Selah Saterstrom evokes this land and life in The Pink Institution, letting gusts of fresh, tart air blow into the old halls of Southern Gothic.”
Westchester Journal News:
“Selah Saterstrom’s astonishing debut The Pink Institution adheres to a logic all its own. Though set in the Deep South, this fable of the reconstruction won’t remind you of the Southern-goth novels you read in high school or during the occasional lost weekend in the realms of Faulkner or, more recently, Madison Smartt Bell. Saterstrom has stripped away every convention of Dixie fiction and replaced them with a series of discrete, crystalline meditations.”
ForeWord:
“Not a word is wasted as this slight volume hurtles readers through four generations of Mississippi women. . . . The Pink Institution demands that readers pay attention. For those who do, the payoffs are insights and images almost beautiful in their brutality.”
Minneapolis Observer:
“‘Multigenerational family saga’ the phrase conjures thick paperbacks, Maeve Binchy novels, casts of thousands. But Selah Saterstrom’s first novel, The Pink Institution, a slender volume, is just as epic. . . . Saterstrom’s images resonate long after her story ends.”
Tarpaulin Sky :
“The reader who accepts the invitation to enter The Pink Institution should do so with care. She should enter with her wits intact. She should enter with her courage summoned. She should enter with her skirts lifted and with her intellect polished shiny as a ‘sterling tea service predating the Civil War.’ The reader should take along her smelling salts. . . . In this book, language is not placed on top of story. Story, instead, is born of language.”
Minnesota Literature :
“In this visually arresting book, Selah Saterstrom pushes the novelistic form to its gasping limits, and in doing so explodes the twin mythologies of the Southern Gothic and the cult of White Southern Womanhood.”
Publishers Weekly :
“Harrowing but gorgeous . . . Saterstrom’s beautiful novel paints a portrait of a family wracked by its own dysfunction and held fast by a place that has never fully recovered since the day the Civil War began—the day known, as the book tellingly reminds us, as ‘Ruination Day.’”
Library Journal :
“Saterstrom takes a fresh approach to the South’s most beloved genre . . . Both touching and stylistically imaginative, this work is highly recommended.”
Ron Silliman, Silliman’s Blog:
“Imagine, if you will, As I Lay Dying as told by Dodie Bellamy. Like the Faulkner classic, The Pink Institution is not simply the telling of a story of a family totally out of control, with a strong Southern flavor but it is also the telling of multiple generations in a very spare book.”
Modern Times Bookstore Newsletter:
“Like an experimentally inclined Annie Proulx, Saterstrom tersely renders the effects of social violence on individual lives . . . the effect is shattering and transcendent.”
Bull’s Headlines, Bull’s Head Bookshop Newsletter:
“It’s important to support what’s new and vital, while respecting what’s old and deep, and here, in this slender novel, the author’s achieved both.”
Jacqueline Kirkpatrick, Bookhouse of Stuyvesant Plaza:
“Such a different form of storytelling, I fell in love. [Saterstrom’s] writing is beautiful and raw. This book is a collection of American history that needs to be read, explored and appreciated. I will definitely be recommending this.”
Plymouth District Library Librarian’s Choice:
“Saterstrom’s novel is a harsh journey through the years, demonstrating the dysfunctional nature that can be passed down from parent to child. Her book is more than shock value, however, featuring beautifully worded passages and demonstrating a fine talent for using sparse phrasing to maximum effect.”
Rebecca Brown:
“Happy families may all be alike, but even unhappy families have started to look pretty similar these days. Then there’s the family created in Selah Saterstrom’s multigenerational bildungsroman about America and the South, and women and men, and madness and whatever desperate things we do in order to, maybe, for a while, survive. Selah Saterstrom has a daring, artful voice. I am confident The Pink Institution is only the first of many astoundingly beautiful, brutally disturbing works of art.”
Michael Klein:
“The Pink Institution is a book to be savored like a feast in the middle of nowhere—rich, strange, fragmentary and yet utterly compelling. Selah Saterstrom has managed to gather influences from visual art, photography, music, captions, footnotes, directories, family histories and weave them into a book of marvels and mysteries. Reader, go slow. This is a dream.”
Jeanne Mackin:
“These stories are haunting and mesmerizing. They bring to life a family filled with complex events and unexpected emotions, and linger in the imagination long after we finish reading them. This is a masterful debut for Selah Saterstrom.”
Also by this author:
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