the pink institution

BEAUTIFUL AND VIOLENT, SPARE AND OMINOUS, THIS WHOLLY ORIGINAL NOVEL EXPLODES MYTHOLOGIES OF SOUTHERN FEMININITY.

In a multigenerational family saga that captures the rich beauty and passionate despair of the land and its inhabitants, The Pink Institution is a riveting, visceral novel written in a style that elegantly unites poetic prose with historic photographs and texts. It is also a testament to the legacy that war, violence, abuse, and poverty have wrought upon the Deep South. As we follow four generations of determined and relentless Mississippi women from their run-down, post-Civil War plantations to their modern-day trailer parks, the impoverished decay of the Deep South expresses itself through their bloodlines in a haunting reenactment of the past.

REVIEWS

Saterstrom writes with a poet’s economy and eye for visceral detail, collapsing into a mere 140 pages a four-generation history of a Southern family bedeviled by alcoholism, poverty, racism, violence, and mental illness. Her spareness is a mercy. The story she tells is brutal, almost impossible to take; at the same time, her exquisite, cut-to-the-quick language makes this book impossible to put down. —HuffPost

Brutal but also deeply lyrical, 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.” —Publishers Weekly

I loved reading this book, but when I was done I found myself incapable of encapsulating what I had just read. I think that’s the point. This is a book to linger over and re-read. —Terry Pitts, Vertigo

Praise

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. —Michael Klein

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. —Jeanne Mackin

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. —Rebecca Brown

Excerpt

She found it in the corner. She picked it up. Brought it close. This happened at a time when her head was unusually large. She loved games. Two favorites being “Cleaning Out Shoes” and “Feeling Old People’s Skin.” In “Cleaning Out Shoes” she would take a bobby pin and run it through the grooves on the bottoms of people’s shoes, removing and examining minute grit, color of raisins. In “Feeling Old People’s Skin” she would move her hand down the arms of old people with her eyes closed. These were not the same as finding something. She found an eraser. In the corner, a pink beat-up novelty eraser in the shape of a robot based on a cartoon character called “Transformer.” The eraser had been used. She held it between two gummy fingers in front of her large head…. —The Feminist Wire