Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live
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Book Overview
This National Book Critics Circle Award is "an entrancing attempt to catch what falls between: the irreducibly personal, messy, even embarrassing ways reading and living bleed into each other, which neither literary criticism nor autobiography ever quite acknowledges" (The New York Times). "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 Václav 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.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:1936787253
ISBN13:9781936787258
Release Date:October 2016
Publisher:Catapult
Length:276 Pages
Weight:0.98 lbs.
Dimensions:0.9" x 5.5" x 8.3"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
One of my favorites- a overview of the author's favorite books
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 6 years ago
It re-invigorated my love of reading and because he pulls the books through episodes of his own life and pieces of the authors' lives, the pages become very personal and intimate. My favorite if the Orner books I've read.
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