Am I alone here? : notes on living to read and reading to live
Publication Information
New York : Catapult, [2016]
Physical Description
xvii, 316 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
Summary
"'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 Vc̀lav 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 readers to return to the essential stories of their own lives"--From publisher's description.
Contents
- 1. Sometimes I believe we are being tested. Chekhov's way of dying
- A bachelor uncle
- Winter in September
- Wideman's welcome
- The lonely voice
- Stray thoughts on Kafka
- Eudora Welty, badass
- Walser on Mission Street
- On the beauty of not writing, or, An unnecessary homage to Juan Rulfo
- 2. Let me cook you an egg. Upper Moose Lake, 1990
- My father's gloves
- Unforgivable
- While reading Imre Kertész
- Under all this noise
- Hit and run
- Carter on boredom
- Shameless impostors
- The infinite passion of Gina Berriault
- Since the beginning of time
- Surviving the lives we have
- Every grief-soaked word
- A black boy, a white boy
- A small note from Haiti
- 3. And here you are climbing trees. Mad passionate true love
- Frederick the Great
- An American writer: Victor Martinez
- Cheever in Albania
- All lives are interesting
- Sisters and brothers
- Parting
- What feels like the world
- Virgie walking away
- Cincinnati, 2001
- Salter
- Early morning thought on Ahab
- All fathers are fictional
- Ronald A. Orner
- Letter from New Melleray, Iowa
- A palm-of-the-hand story
- Night train to Split
- Father's death: the final version.