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A Novel
by Peter Orner
Alexander Popper can't stop remembering. Four years old when his father tossed him into Lake Michigan, he was told, Sink or swim, kid. In his mind, he's still bobbing in that frigid water. The rest of this novel's vivid cast of characters also struggle to remain afloat: Popper's mother, stymied by an unhappy marriage, seeks solace in the relentless energy of Chicago; his brother, Leo, shadow boss of the family, retreats into books; paternal grandparents, Seymour and Bernice, once high fliers, now mourn for long lost days; his father, a lawyer and would-be politician obsessed with his own success, fails to see that the family is falling apart; and his college girlfriend, the fiercely independent Kat, wrestles with impossible choices.
Covering four generations of the Popper family, Peter Orner illuminates the countless ways that love both makes us whole and completely unravels us. A comic and sorrowful tapestry of memory of connection and disconnection, Love and Shame and Love explores the universals with stunning originality and wisdom.
"Starred Review. A richly layered, intimate picture of a distinctive but also typical family enduring life's vicissitudes and stoically carrying on." - Publishers Weekly
"Orner's short, jittery chapters, some a mere paragraph or two; his incomplete sentences, which completely control the narrative; and his gift for the well-placed single word that can denote full-throttled exasperation are addictively compelling and could very well send readers to his earlier works." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. [A] masterful, multifaceted novel. Readers will find both love and shame in abundance in Orner's teeming fictional world." - Kirkus Reviews
"[An] emotionally saturated yet briskly episodic novel..." - Booklist
This information about Love and Shame and Love 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 was born in Chicago and is the author of two widely praised books, Esther Stories and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. He is also the editor of two books of nonfiction, Underground America and Hope Deferred: Narrative of Zimbabwean Lives. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, Best American Stories, and he has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, Orner has taught at the University of Montana and the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa . Orner now lives in San Francisco and is a faculty member at San Francisco State University. You can visit him online at www.peterorner.net.
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