Peter Orner: Love and Shame and Love

Description

LAUNCH PARTY!
Covering four generations of the Popper family, Peter Orner illuminates the countless ways that love both makes us whole and completely unravels us. Alternately comic and sorrowful, LOVE AND SHAME AND LOVE: A Novel explores the universals with stunning originality and wisdom.

"Love and Shame and Love is an epic book—epic like Gilgamesh and epic like a guitar solo." -- Daniel Handler

This is a big, smart, generous, important novel." Antonya Nelson

"Auden said that art is born of humiliation, which seems an ideal place to start appreciating Love and Shame and Love. A keen-eyed observer of American life and history, Peter Orner strips every layer of pretense from his characters, not to diminish but rather to reveal them. This is a real and memorable America." --Yiyun Li

"I consider Peter Orner an essential American writer... Esther Stories was among the best story collections of the last decade. Love and Shame and Love is among the best novels of this fresh new one." -- Kevin Brockmeier

Alexander Popper can’t stop remembering. Four years old when his father tossed him into Lake Michigan, he was told, Sink or swim, kid. In his mind, he’s still bobbing in that frigid water. The rest of this novel’s vivid cast of characters also struggle to remain afloat: Popper’s mother, stymied by an unhappy marriage, seeks solace in the relentless energy of Chicago; his brother, Leo, shadow boss of the family, retreats into books; paternal grandparents, Seymour and Bernice, once high fliers, now mourn for long-lost days; his father, a lawyer and would-be politician obsessed with his own success, fails to see that the family is falling apart; and his college girlfriend, the fiercely independent Kat, wrestles with impossible choices.



Peter Orner was born in Chicago and is the author of two widely praised books, Esther Stories and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. Orner is also the editor of two books of oral history, Underground America and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and The Best American Short Stories, and has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, Orner has taught at the University of Montana and the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and is a permanent faculty member at San Francisco State University. He lives with his family in San Francisco.

"In this emotionally saturated yet briskly episodic novel about a brash city on a Great Lake, and a family navigating the rough waters of ambition and disappointment, pain and sorrow,Orner achieves a remarkable mix of psychological nuance, imaginative storytelling, and historical verisimilitude as he leapfrogs through four decades..." -- Booklist, starred review

More Info

Link

http://www.booksmith.com/event/peter-ornder-love-and-shame-a...