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Love and Shame and Love
Alexander Popper can't stop remembering. Four years old when his father tossed him into Lake Michigan, he was told, Sink or swim, kid. In his mind, he's still bobbing in that frigid water. The rest of this novel's vivid cast of characters also struggle to remain afloat: Popper's mother, stymied by an unhappy marriage, seeks solace in the relentless energy of Chicago; his brother, Leo, shadow boss of the family, retreats into books; paternal grandparents, Seymour and Bernice, once high fliers, now mourn for long lost days; his father, a lawyer and would-be politician obsessed with his own success, fails to see that the family is falling apart; and his college girlfriend, the fiercely independent Kat, wrestles with impossible choices. Covering four generations of the Popper family, Peter Orner illuminates the countless ways that love both makes us whole and completely unravels us. A comic and sorrowful tapestry of memory of connection and disconnection, Love and Shame and Love explores the universals with stunning originality and wisdom.
Am I Alone Here?
This National Book Critics Circle Award is “an entrancing attempt to catch what falls between: the irreducibly personal, messy, even embarrassing ways reading and living bleed into each other, which neither literary criticism nor autobiography ever quite acknowledges" (The New York Times). “Stories, both my own and those I’ve taken to heart, make up whoever it is that I’ve become,” Peter Orner writes in this collection of essays about reading, writing, and living. Orner reads and writes everywhere he finds himself: a hospital cafeteria, a coffee shop in Albania, or a crowded bus in Haiti. The result is a book of unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir. Among the many writer...
Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge
Peter Orner zeroes in on the strange ways our memories define us: A woman's husband dies before their divorce is finalized; a man runs for governor of Illinois and loses much more than an election; two brothers play beneath the infamous bridge at Chappaquiddick. Employing the masterful compression for which he has been widely praised, Orner presents a kaleidoscope of individual lives viewed in startling, intimate close-up. Whether writing of Geraldo Rivera's attempt to reveal the contents of Al Capone's vault or of a father and daughter trying to outrun a hurricane, Orner illuminates universal themes. In stories that span considerable geographic ground -- from Chicago to Wyoming, from Massachusetts to the Czech Republic -- he writes of the past we can't seem to shake, the losses we can't make up for, and the power of our stories to help us reclaim what we thought was gone forever. "A ravishing collection, full of wisdom, grief, beauty, and especially surprise." -- Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collectors
Still No Word From You
Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay A new collection of pieces on literature and life by the author of Am I Alone Here?, a finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism Stationed in the South Pacific during World War II, Seymour Orner wrote a letter every day to his wife, Lorraine. She seldom responded, leading him to plead in 1945, “Another day and still no word from you.” Seventy years later, Peter Orner writes in response to his grandfather’s plea: “Maybe we read because we seek that word from someone, from anyone.” From the acclaimed fiction writer about whom Dwight Garner of The New York Times wrote, “You know from the second you pick him...
Esther Stories
The discovery of a murdered man in a bathrobe by the side of a road, the destruction of a town's historic City Hall building, and the recollection of a cruel wartime decision are equally affecting in Orner's vivid and intimate gaze. The first half of the book concerns the lives of unrelated strangers across the American landscape, and the second introduces two very different Jewish families, one on the East Coast, the other in the Midwest. Yet Orner's real territory is memory, and this book of wide-ranging and innovative stories remains an important and unique contribution to the art of the American short story.
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
Set in Namibia just after independence in the early 1990s, Peter Orner's first novel is a chronicle of the long days, short loves, and cold nights at Goas, an all-boys Catholic primary school so deep in the veld that "even the baboons feel sorry for us." Though physically isolated in semi-desert beneath a relentless sun, the people of Goas create an alternate, more fertile universe through the stories they tell each other. The book's central character is Mavala Shikongo, a combat veteran who fought in Namibia's long war for independence against South Africa. She has recently returned to the school -- with a child, but no husband. Mavala is modern, restless, and driven, in sharp contrast to conservative Goas. All the male teachers (including a bumbling but observant volunteer from Cincinnati) try not to fall in love with her. Everyone fails -- immediately and miserably. This extraordinary first novel explores the history of a place through the stories of its people. But above all it's about the fleetingness of love and the endurance of fellowship.
Underground America
These remarkable oral histories of undocumented men and women struggling to carve a life for themselves in the U.S. “[fill] a gap in our understanding of [immigration] by humanizing the people at the center of an otherwise cold debate” (Huffington Post) They arrive from around the world for countless reasons. Many come simply to make a living. Others are fleeing persecution in their native countries. Millions of immigrants risk deportation and imprisonment by living in the U.S. without legal status. They are living underground, with little protection from exploitation at the hands of human smugglers, employers, or law enforcement. Underground America presents the remarkable stories of U....
The Tunnel
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE A FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed Israeli author, a suspenseful and poignant story of a family coping with the sudden mental decline of their beloved husband and father--an engineer who they discover is involved in an ominous secret military project Until recently, Zvi Luria was a healthy man in his seventies, an engineer living in Tel Aviv with his wife, Dina, visiting with their two children whenever possible. Now he is showing signs of early dementia, and his work on the tunnels of the Trans-Israel Highway is no longer possible. To keep his mind sharp, Zvi decides to take a job as the unpaid ass...
Esther Stories
Covering considerable geographic ground--from Nova Scotia to Mississippi--the stories in this debut collection explore the impact of life's essential moments. Winner of the 2000 James Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Hope Deferred
Hope Deferred asks the question: How did Zimbabwe, a country with so much promise—a stellar education system, a growing middle class, a sophisticated economic infrastructure, a liberal constitution, and an independent judiciary—come so close to collapse? In their own words, Zimbabweans tell their stories of losing their homes, land, livelihoods, and families as a direct result of political violence. They describe being tortured in detention, firebombed at work, or beaten up or raped to “punish” votes for the opposition. Those forced to flee to neighboring countries recount their escapes: cutting through fences, swimming across crocodile-infested rivers, and entrusting themselves to human smugglers. This book includes. Zimbabweans of every age, class, and political conviction—from farm laborers and academics to doctors and artists—ordinary people surviving the fragmentation of a once-thriving nation.
