In this powerful and virtuosic collection of interlocking stories, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist takes the form to new heights.
In his orchestral and moving new book, Peter Orner, a writer who “doesn’t simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls” (New York Times Book Review), chronicles people whose lives are at inflection points. In forty-four compressed gems, he … inflection points. In forty-four compressed gems, he grips us with a series of defining moments.
Whether it’s a first date that turns into a late-night road trip to a séance in an abandoned airplane hangar, or a family’s memories of the painful mystery surrounding a forgotten uncle’s demise, Orner reveals how our fleeting decisions between kindness and abandonment chase us across time. These stories are anchored by a poignant novella that delivers not only the joys and travails of a forty-year marriage, but an entire era in a working-class New England city. Bristling with the crackling energy of life itself, Maggie Brown & Others marks the most sustained achievement to date for “a master of his form” (New York Times).
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What kind of word magician writes a novella in short stories that leaves me in tears when a character dies? These snippets pieced together a life, a community. And I hated to leave.
I had heard a lot of buzz about Peter Orner’s Maggie Brown & Others. And it was on my pre-approved NetGalley shelf. I squeezed it into my reading schedule.
The early short stories captivated me. Twice I quoted the book for David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence on Twitter, where people post ‘the best sentence’ they read that week:
An old boyfriend once told her that she had a way of using magnanimity as a weapon.
Shouts in the dark. Maybe that’s the best we can do to reach beyond ourselves.
I noted lovely sentences such as, “Her shoulder blades are still shaped like the prows of rowboats.” And pointed insights like “There’s something so ruthless about optimism.”
The diverse stories are insightful and I loved meeting all of these people, learning so much about them through these small slivers of life.
In the fourth section of the book, Walt Kaplan is Broke: A Novella, we meet a good man with a small life, a broke man rich in love. The stories jump through time, building the story of Fall River in New Jersey and the remnant community of Jews–those who have died and “the ones waiting for the opportunity.”
You have to love people like Walt and Sarah Kaplan who ask “you wanna” and then push their twin beds together, never having considered purchasing a queen bed.
I could return to these stories again and again.
In one story a writer is told there is no money in writing short stories! I would guess that is true, but I am sure glad writers like Orner still employ the form.
I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
The stories in Peter Orner’s Maggie Brown & Others feel eternally human, less like they’ve been written and rather like they’ve been drawn by patient hands from an ancient aquifer of memory, longing, and soulful knowing.
No one captures the inner lives of vanished places and people like Peter Orner. Radiant, funny, full of wisdom and heart, his vibrant portraits pulse with authentic energy and are as perfectly tuned to his characters’ idiosyncratic speech as those of Grace Paley.
It’s unusual for a writer of such great detail and originality to still have so much heart on his sleeve. I didn’t realize how I’d missed actual feeling in our celebrated younger writers until I fell onto Peter Orner and these sublime new stories. I may not go back.
To read Peter Orner’s stories is to live simultaneously in so many lives: the reader’s memories intertwine with the characters’, the characters’ dreams resurface in the reader’s. People we have loved and lost, people we have encountered and missed — they wait for us to rediscover them in Orner’s stories. This book, exquisitely written, is as necessary and expansive as life.
Peter Orner is an extraordinary writer, and Maggie Brown & Others was a deep pleasure to read. His stories teem with life and energy, and unfold with a kind of soulful grace he has made all his own.