Patty Yumi Cottrell's 10 Favorite Books of the Decade

"As part of The A.V. Club's best of the 2010s coverage, we asked some of our favorite authors to share their 10 favorite books of the decade. Next up is Patty Yumi Cottrell. Cottrell's novel, Sorry To Disrupt The Peace, published by McSweeney's in 2017, follows 32-year-old Helen as she learns of her adoptive brother's suicide, then returns to her hometown of Milwaukee to "investigate." A surreal comic tension runs throughout, with the reader understanding more about the narrator's strange, pushed-to-the-edge behavior than she does. In an interview with The Paris Review, Cottrell characterizes the work of Jane Bowles, one of her influences, as "curdled realism," which perfectly describes the tilted tone and perspective of Sorry To Disrupt The Peace as well. The novel, for which Cottrell won a Whiting Award in 2018, is unsettling and sad and uncomfortably funny, and it was one of our favorite books of the decade."