Publishers Weekly
★ 06/06/2022
Pushcart Prize–winning fiction writer Orner (Maggie Brown & Others) brings his lyrical, mosaic style to the story of his own life in this gorgeous and contemplative memoir. Blending photographs, family lore, speculation, and literary musings, Orner’s nonlinear narrative weaves through elliptical reflections and faint memories from his 1970s childhood to the sorrows and delights of his adulthood. The poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, for instance, becomes a salve in the aftermath of his stepfather’s death, loitering in Orner’s mind as he reflects on his mother’s grief: “We all go where love takes us, whether closer or farther.” Elsewhere, seeking solace from some unnamed grievance, Orner spends a day marveling at the crowded prose of Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day: “ connect like they do in our actual brains. Meaning: they don’t.” A similar stream of consciousness logic pervades his loosely connected vignettes, with certain recurring figures and dreamlike appearances of half-forgotten acquaintances. As Orner observes, “There’s no greater fantasy on the face of the earth than the linearity of time. Time only circles.” Likewise, when his fragmented ruminations loop back to a powerful impression or image or favorite book, the effect is like turning over a prism in one’s hands, catching vivid flashes of light at each angle. Evocative and erudite, this meditation on impermanence and its ephemeral joys is a gem. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Finalist for the Vermont Book Award
Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
"Orner is a highly lauded author whose writing, in both fiction and nonfiction, is an act of wizardry. In each of these micro-essays, he reduces the meat of his own life down to the bone, then stirs in fatty excerpts from hundreds of stories, novels and poems by writers ranging from Woolf to Rhys, Babel to Kafka. The resulting brew sometimes scalds, sometimes soothes, but always proves that literature can be a kind of sustenance." —Stephanie Elizondo Griest, The New York Times Book Review
“Like its predecessor collection Am I Alone Here?, a 2016 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, Still No Word From You is a book of conversations: Orner in dialogue with other books, Orner in dialogue with himself . . . Still No Word From You looks at its author’s life through the lens of reading: memoir as daybook, as it were. In 107 short essays or chapters (some just a paragraph), Orner shapeshifts and time travels." —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
"Yearning for lost time infuses every page of [Peter Orner's] second nonfiction collection . . . The book compiles 107 micro-essays that are part reader’s notebook and part, in his words, 'reluctant memoir.' It’s a meditation on storytelling from a wide-ranging thinker and reader, mining Orner’s past, generations of family history and the many fictional folks swirling around his mind." —Lisa Taggert, The San Francisco Chronicle
"If there’s an ideal autumn book, it’s a book about books, writers and reading. Still No Word From You: Notes in the Margin (Oct. 11), by the always undervalued Peter Orner, swings seamlessly between his Highland Park boyhood (a Cheever tale, writ large) and his reading life, mourning family, and even stumbling on his mother’s youthful marginalia." —Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune
"[Orner's] compassion for humanity, both despite and because of the cruelties and the griefs which we inflict and suffer, gleams unmistakably through his prose." —Daniel Kraft, On the Seawall
"A heartfelt memoir in books and marginalia . . . In Peter Orner’s Still No Word from You, literature and life are inextricably intertwined, each illuminating the other." —Julia M. Klein, The Forward
"Peter Orner’s new book, Still No Word From You, reads like a full expression of a mind, in a different way than a novel might be an expression of a mind . . . The tone is intimate, digressive, and personal, and the cumulative effect is a total immersion in the author’s way of seeing." —Emma Cline, Literary Hub
"Orner—a legitimate triple-threat: novelist, short story master, and prolific essayist—returns with an addictive collection of more than 100 buoyant essays organized around a single day and a wide range of emotions . . . [A] wise, welcoming, heartfelt book." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Pushcart Prize–winning fiction writer Orner (Maggie Brown & Others) brings his lyrical, mosaic style to the story of his own life in this gorgeous and contemplative memoir. Blending photographs, family lore, speculation, and literary musings, Orner’s nonlinear narrative weaves through elliptical reflections and faint memories from his 1970s childhood to the sorrows and delights of his adulthood . . . When his fragmented ruminations loop back to a powerful impression or image or favorite book, the effect is like turning over a prism in one’s hands, catching vivid flashes of light at each angle. Evocative and erudite, this meditation on impermanence and its ephemeral joys is a gem." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Peter Orner's work clings close to life, to the unadorned, untranscended, dear and haunting Actual." ––Marilynne Robinson
“This is a unique concoction, with essays bleeding into stories, and coming out the other side, and creating something new. Still No Word from You is a beautiful piece of work that demonstrates the special illumination on life granted by a passion for reading.” ––Kevin Barry, author of Night Boat to Tangier
"What to call this gloriously strange marvel of a book devoted to other books? Who cares? Still No Word from You offers solace to those among us who look out windows, whose minds wander, who are bewildered by time and memory. It is an elegy to long-gone houses, bookstores, teachers, family, writers, and all of the murmuring dead; an ode to the parenthetical, which, it turns out, is not parenthetical at all; a beautiful testament to the way the books we love are not merely as real as life, they are life." ––Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women
"Still No Word from You is a sharp-edged and heartfelt mosaic of the reading life. I know of no other writer working today who so exquisitely and seamlessly brings together storytelling, memoir, essay, and the act of reading as both a visionary and an intimate journey." ––Eduardo Halfon, author of Mourning
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-07-20
Another top-notch collection from the author of Am I Alone Here?
Orner—a legitimate triple-threat: novelist, short story master, and prolific essayist—returns with an addictive collection of more than 100 buoyant essays organized around a single day and a wide range of emotions. “Preaching the gospel of fiction”—and literature in general—the author roves around freely, exploring the work of Virginia Woolf, John Cheever, Primo Levi, Shirley Hazzard, Gina Berriault, Robert Hayden Marilynne Robinson, Yoel Hoffmann, Stacy Doris, Juan Rulfo, and numerous others. The lyrical chapters unwind from noisy “Morning” to melancholy “Night.” Orner begins with vivid memories of his “loud, cackling” family members—mother, father, uncles, Grandpa Freddy in Fall River, Massachusetts—and growing up in Highland Park near Lake Michigan, a “tear rolling down the face of the Midwest,” and he recounts the sadness a “dumb Jewish kid” felt watching Larry Holmes beat Muhammad Ali in 1980. Later, the author confesses, while reflecting on the more than 4,000 haiku that Richard Wright composed during his career, “like so many of my stories, nonstories, there’s no movement, no forward momentum.” By “Mid-Morning,” Orner is wistful that fellow Midwestern author Wright Morris is “forgotten, yes, but still among us.” Orner also ponders his grandfather’s World War II letters to his “showgirl wife,” Lorraine, often begging her to write him back. The author tells us why he “permanently borrowed” James Alan McPherson’s Hue and Cry from the library, a book that contains “Gold Coast,” a story he wishes he could memorize and recite “like a prayer.” Ella Leffland’s Mrs. Munck, which he left unfinished on a train, is one of those rare books “you go on reading whether you are reading them or not.”
As Orner inches toward “Night,” readers will be lamenting the end of his wise, welcoming, heartfelt book.
