Maggie Brown & Others
Stories
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
In this powerful and virtuosic collection of interlocking stories, each one "a marvel of concision and compassion" (Washington Post), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and "master of his form" (New York Times) takes the short story to new heights.
Through forty-four compressed gems, Peter Orner, a writer who "doesn't simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls" (NYT Book Review), chronicles people whose lives are at inflection points, gripping 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 neglected 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).A New York Times Notable BookA Chicago Tribune Notable BookAn Oprah Magazine Best Book of 2019Kirkus Reviews Best Short Fiction of 2019Longlisted for the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I'm always interested in the way people edit the details of their lives, the way they compress all the years into sentences," says the narrator of one of this collection's 44 powerful tales, expressing Orner's talent for crafting captivating character sketches that read like memoirs. Loosely linked by their shared settings (Chicago; Fall River, Mass.) and characters, the stories comprise a mosaic of lives remarkable primarily for an ordinariness one character reflects that "his friends, his family, considered him a failure, he knew, not a spectacular failure, a mundane, run-of-the-mill failure" that occasionally is thrown into sharp relief by a dramatic incident, such as a near car crash that reveals the narrator's true nature in "My Dead," or a young man's taunting, in the title story, of a disaffected roommate whom he doesn't know is carrying a gun. The final story, "Walt Kaplan Is Broke: A Novella," crystallizes the concerns of the stories that precede it in its account of a middle-aged Jewish businessman struggling to stay on top of what characters in another story think of as "a world with so little sense of order." Readers will sympathize with Orner's characters and identify with their all-too-human frailties.
