Description

Stories both my own and those Ive taken to heart make up whoever it is that Ive 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 twentythree 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 Vclav Havel make appearances as well as the poet Herbert Morrisabout 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 listeners to return to the essential stories of their own lives