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Title details for Am I Alone Here? by Peter Orner - Available

Am I Alone Here?

Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live

by Peter Orner
Chris Abernathy
Audiobook
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"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 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. 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. An 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. At once personal and panoramic, this book will inspire listeners to return to the essential stories of their own lives.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 25, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781696609890
      • File size: 197626 KB
      • Duration: 06:51:43

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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