Although our city has enough character to plot a North Coast Odyssey, Cleveland too rarely crops up as a literary setting. So in anticipation of this month’s Cleveland Book Week and its Sept. 27 centerpiece Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, we pick a few favorites worthy of the city’s canon.
CLASSIC
American Splendor & More American Splendor: The Life & Times of Harvey Pekar (2003)
by Harvey Pekar, multiple illustrators
Is it hyperbolic to call Harvey Pekar the patron saint of Cleveland art? The Cleveland Heights filing clerk’s disgruntled panels captured nothing less than the holy beauty of the banal, a testament to the weight and poetry of everyday life set against a Cleveland skyline. From 1973 to 2008, multiple illustrators drew his stories to life in the American Splendor comics, but Pekar’s grievances tied them together in sardonic symmetry, whether he was bemoaning the Cleveland Browns or touting his favorite jazz record. Here, Pekar validated Cleveland’s voice as something worth reading. Bonus Pick: The Bluest Eye (1970), by Toni Morrison
UNDERRATED
The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread (1965)
by Don Robertson
In Morris Bird III, Cleveland has its Huck Finn. The 9-year-old protagonist is on an epic quest, single-mindedly crossing the East Side to meet his friend hours before the 1944 East Ohio Gas explosion, one of the worst industrial disasters in American history. Through Bird’s eyes, Cleveland’s characters live in vibrant flux, from his stern radio announcer father to the throbbing crowd at the East High-Central High football showdown. Stephen King pegged Robertson as a major influence, and Sliced Bread proves the point. An ode to a city and boy on the brink of major upheaval, the novel humanizes a forgotten tragedy while sketching a poignant, familiar portrait of a Cleveland childhood. Bonus Pick: Crooked River Burning (2001), by Mark Winegardner
NEW ARRIVALS
Little Fires Everywhere (2018)
by Celeste Ng
In Little Fires Everywhere, Shaker Heights looms as large as the contentious families who inhabit it. Elena, the wealthy Richardsons’ mother, finds comfort in its strict planning, a progressive utopia where everything and everyone is in place. But when the Warrens move in, their mercurial, transient lifestyle unnerves Elena. Smoldering tensions spark into a blaze when a brutal custody battle erupts between the families’ friends, exposing fault lines in the carefully manicured community. By using multiple narrative perspectives, Ng exposes the boiler pot of class disparity and race relations that still trouble Northeast Ohio. Bonus Pick: Believing In Cleveland: Managing Decline In The Best Location In the Nation (2017), by J. Mark Souther
