Am I Alone Here?

August 22, 2016
Orner, a distinguished fiction writer (Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge), appears here as a devoted book lover, inviting the reader to an intimate and friendly book group of two. Closely scrutinizing individual stories, he illuminates writers as canonical as Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol, as well-known as Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow, and as far-flung as Álvaro Mutis and Yasunari Kawabata. Eudora Welty gets an eye-opening reading, not as “anybody’s favorite auntie” but as a “badass” writer. The heart of this book is with short-story writers, including, among 21 of them, Gina Berriault, Wright Morris, Breece D’J Pancake, William Trevor, and Robert Walser. Orner’s recollections of reading are always situated in a specific place and moment; in Albania or Haiti, South Carolina or Wisconsin; while he’s searching his book-overstuffed garage for a particular work, or waiting for a traffic light to change; at the hospital where his grandmother dies, or reflecting on the death of his father (for whom this book is very much a memorial). Orner is a pleasure to read, and to read with. Readers will be delighted to join him, grab one of the stories he delves into, and enjoy his company.

A collection of literary tapas.Novelist and short story writer Orner (Creative Writing/San Francisco State Univ.; Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, 2013, etc.) combines short, reflective essays about literature with personal memories. The pieces (some previously published) are literary hybrids, and the book becomes a series of "unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir." The big names (Kafka, Chekhov, Melville, Cheever, Bellow, etc.) are well-represented, but so too are those outside of the canon--e.g., Lyonel Trouillot, Alvaro Mutis, Bohumil Hrabal and his "lightning strike of a novel," Too Loud a Solitude. In the first piece, ostensibly about how Orner likes to read, reflect, look around, and just listen at San Francisco's General Hospital's cafeteria, the author transitions to Chekhov's "tender and sorrowful" story "The Bishop," which he admires for how the author (a doctor) lovingly employs details. He ends thinking about his dead grandmother. In a cabin in Bolinas, California, Orner thinks about his dead father and reads Breece D'J Pancake's story "First Day of Winter," which "gets [him] every time. The way a story about characters, nonexistent people, pushes us back to our own." Orner confesses that John Edgar Wideman's story "Welcome" is the "saddest story" he has ever read "by a wide margin." Again, thinking about his father, he asks, what is the best Father's Day novel? "Hands down The Brothers Karamazov." But Bernard Malamud's "My Son the Murderer" is the best story. While it takes Dostoevsky 700 pages "to get to the bottom of fathers and sons," Malamud "can name that tune in under 8." At 22, he accidentally fell out of a canoe but saved the book he was reading--the indelible and "generous" To the Lighthouse--and then anxiously waited for it to dry in the sun so he could finish it. Book lovers will devour these genuine, personal tales about literature and reading. Refreshing, finely turned gems of wit and wisdom from an author who has asked his family to bury him with a "decent library." COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 15, 2016
A consummate fiction writer (Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge, 2013) and a ravenous reader, Orner reveals the full depth of his literary passion in this engrossing, ruefully confessional, and emotionally suspenseful, linked essay collection. Orner's hunger for books is stoked by his loss and guilt in the wake of his father's death and a divorce complicated by his former wife's mental illness. Consequently he embeds piquant memories and musings within his incisive appreciation for short stories by such masters as Chekhov, Kafka, Welty, Cheever, Mavis Gallant, and Gina Berriault. The resulting evocative memoir-in-books is akin to Will Schwalbe's Books for Living (2016), but it is more nuanced, more artistic, more mysterious, and more wrenching. Orner shares vivid and urgent dispatches from the reading front in Cincinnati, Prague, Mexico, Albania, Chicago, and South Carolina, in which life and literature are potently fused. Reading Breece D'J Pancake is an hour of prayer, while John Edgar Wideman's work is like a shot of epinephrine. Orner confides, I have come to the conclusion that reading keeps me alive, period. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)