His previous collection of essays, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

PETER ORNER is the author of the novels The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love and the story collections Esther Stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others. At once personal and panoramic, this book will inspire readers to return to the essential stories of their own lives. Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Yasunari Kawabata, Saul Bellow, Mavis Gallant, John Edgar Wideman, William Trevor, and Václav Havel make appearances, as well as the poet Herbert Morris–about whom almost nothing is known.Īn elegy for an eccentric late father, and the end of a marriage, Am I Alone Here? is also a celebration of the possibility of renewal. The result is a book of unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir.Īmong the many writers Orner addresses are Isaac Babel and Zora Neale Hurston, both of whom told their truths and were silenced Franz Kafka, who professed loneliness but craved connection Robert Walser, who spent the last twenty-three years of his life in a Swiss insane asylum, working at being crazy and Juan Rulfo, who practiced the difficult art of silence. Orner reads and writes everywhere he finds himself: a hospital cafeteria, a coffee shop in Albania, or a crowded bus in Haiti. “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. 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).

Am I Alone Here? by Peter Orner