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Notes in the Margin
by Peter Orner
A new collection of pieces on literature and life by the author of Am I Alone Here?, a finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism
Stationed in the South Pacific during World War II, Seymour Orner wrote a letter every day to his wife, Lorraine. She seldom responded, leading him to plead in 1945, "Another day and still no word from you." Seventy years later, Peter Orner writes in response to his grandfather's plea: "Maybe we read because we seek that word from someone, from anyone."
From the acclaimed fiction writer about whom Dwight Garner of The New York Times wrote, "You know from the second you pick him up that he's the real deal," comes Still No Word from You, a unique chain of essays and intimate stories that meld the lived life and the reading life. For Orner, there is no separation. Covering such well-known writers as Lorraine Hansberry, Primo Levi, and Marilynne Robinson, as well as other greats like Maeve Brennan and James Alan McPherson, Orner's highly personal take on literature alternates with his own true stories of loss and love, hope and despair. In his mother's copy of A Coney Island of the Mind, he's stopped short by a single word in the margin, "YES!"—which leads him to conjure his mother at twenty-three. He stops reading Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring three quarters of the way through because he knows that finishing the novel will leave him bereft. Orner's solution is to start again from the beginning to slow the inevitable heartache.
Still No Word from You is a book for anyone for whom reading is as essential as breathing.
"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...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)
"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)
"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, 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." - Chicago Tribune
"Peter Orner's work clings close to life, to the unadorned, untranscended, dear and haunting Actual." – Marilynne Robinson
"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
This information about Still No Word from You was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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. 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. A three-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Orner's work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney's, and has been translated into eight languages. He has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, the California Book Award for fiction, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish fiction, as well as a Fulbright in Namibia. He is the director of creative writing at Dartmouth College and lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont.
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