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Do Something! Do Something! Do Something!
A Novel
By
Joseph Riippi
By
Joseph Riippi
“Joseph Riippi accomplished no easy thing...I fear to touch, fear that my finger will come away surprised by red, by blood. Do something indeed, whether as a Faust or an Eve. Hurry up and just eat the fruit! Riippi has great literary power.”
+ Carolivia Herron, Thereafter Johnnie
“do something! do something! do something! points toward distinctive works to come.”
+ Salar Abdoh, The Poet Game; Opium
"Do Something might just be more than a “must read”—it might change the way you look at life."
+Harmoni McGlothlin, notesandgracenotes.com
DO SOMETHING! do something! DO SOMETHING! is Ampersand Books’ first full-length novel. Like Roth’s Newark, Atwood’s handmaiden, or the most recent work of Joseph O’Neill, do something!... conveys an entire people’s existential frustration in the wake of national crises. With dirty prose evoking Johnson’s Jesus’ Son and spare subtlety approaching Carver’s “Cathedral,” Riippi draws the collective tale of American uncertainty into a new millenium—the story of three young people searching for definitiveness and stability in an increasingly volatile and shaky homeland.
A novel by Joseph Riippi
Joseph Riippi was born in Seattle and lives in New York City, where he is getting his MFA at City College. His essays and stories have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, New Delta Review, Salamander, Soon Quarterly, The Bitter Oleander, and others. This is his first novel.
"Joseph Riippi calls his style of writing “Dirty Realism,” which, he explained to the online magazine Every Day Fiction, is composed with “threads of image-rich, shallow streams of consciousness, followed by very direct rhetorical questions to challenge the reader.” That’s probably the MFA talking, but Riippi manages to make good on his promise of challenging the reader in Do Something Do Something Do Something, his first novel. Do Something follows a drunken writer, an institutionalized literary critic, and the woman with the starfish tattoo, three broken Americans whose trials–rape, mental breakdown, substance abuse—Riippi intertwines with the great stresses of contemporary American life, terrorism, and economic collapse. The absence of quotation marks and paragraph breaks makes the reader just as anxious as the subjects, and the murky delineation between exposition and dialogue makes for breathless scenes."
-Mike Riggs
Washington City Paper
Critic's Pick
Critic's Pick