Am I Alone Here? by Peter Orner

Am I Alone Here? by Peter Orner

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.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Peter Dorner is professor emeritus of agricultural economics and dean emeritus of international studies and programs. He was a member of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Council of Economic Advisors and a consultant to foreign agencies. Land Reform in Latin America, Land Reform and Economic Development, Cooperative and Commune, and Resources and Development are only a few of his books.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781936787258
ISBN 10	1936787253
Title	Am I Alone Here?
Author	Peter Orner
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Catapult
Year published	2016-10-25
Number of pages	276
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.