Events

  Peter Orner in conversation with Michelle Richmond     You celebrated Peter Orner’s Love and Shame and Love with us last fall, when it first landed, and now it’s time to celebrate its paperback release – because this is “a powerful and heartfelt family history, one that seems characterized as much by loss and longing as it is by shame and the double dose of love suggested by the book's title” (Chicago Tribune), by “an essential American writer” (Kevin Brockmeier), because Yiyun Li wrote, “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”, because Orner wrote this short and powerful snapshot of missing Victor Martinez, and because Ed Asner stars in the book’s trailer. If you, unfortunately, missed Love and Shame and Love in its original incarnation, wait no longer – join us for a revisit of the Poppers and the writer who tells their tale.     Peter Orner is the 2002-2003 winner of the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection, Esther Stories, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award, and winner of the Samuel Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction. Orner holds both an MFA from the University of Iowa and a degree in law. His work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology and has appeared in a number of national publications, including The Atlantic Monthly and The Paris Review. Orner currently lives in and teaches at San Francisco State University.  Michelle Richmond is the author of the award-winning story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, the novels Dream of the Blue Room and No One You Know, and the New York Times and international bestseller The Year of Fog. We’re looking forward to her new novel in 2013!  “Elegant yet intimate, this is a book that gets into your head and makes itself at home there. Orner’s Love and Shame and Love is more like the James Salter of Light Years and A Sport and a Pastime, with their acutely observed domestic and sexual tension.” – New York Times “An ambitious, kaleidoscopic novel of the Jewish experience in Chicago….Love and Shame and Love serves not only as an ode to the history of Chicago, but to Chicago literature itself….But the more universal story of the Poppers’ thwarted dreams and loves will likely resonate with those who have never set foot in Chicago or its northern suburbs.” — Chicago Tribune“Beautiful…. Think Saul Bellow (Chicago setting, rollicking Jewish-style comedy) mated with Chekhov (unassuming, devastating detail), set to the twangy thump of early Tom Petty. Now that promises quite a love child….” — Boston Globe“Mr. Orner has found a way of making loss and reclamation exist side by side.” —Wall Street Journal