Am I Alone Here?

Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live

Peter Orner2016
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.
Sign up to use

Reviews

Photo of Amy Thibodeau
Amy Thibodeau@amythibodeau
5 stars
Dec 26, 2022
Photo of Konrad Glogowski
Konrad Glogowski@teachandlearn
5 stars
Mar 9, 2024
Photo of Andrew John Kinney
Andrew John Kinney@numidica
4 stars
Aug 18, 2023
Photo of Sonia Grgas
Sonia Grgas@sg911911
5 stars
Feb 23, 2024
Photo of Angie Lee
Angie Lee@angielee
5 stars
Apr 3, 2023
Photo of Penelope
Penelope@booksandmagic
4 stars
Aug 30, 2021