The Lonely Voice #27: William Trevor, What Haunts Us Is Us
And this is the majesty of William Trevor. He creates—and at the same time affirms—the dark we’ve all got inside us. He gives our nightmares flesh.
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Posts by: Peter Orner
The Lonely Voice #32: The Last Lonely Voice
That’s what the Lonely Voice has always been to me. It was a privilege to be allowed to have a private conversation with myself in public.
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The Lonely Voice #31: So Long, James Salter
But our bodies and our brains don’t seem designed, ultimately, to cooperate and Salter joins the ranks of the dead where he doesn’t belong.
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The Lonely Voice #30: Brief Early Morning Thoughts on Ahab
I find that lately I do more reading than writing, and more thinking than either.
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Nous devons être plus que Charlie (We Need to Be More than Charlie)
The only true way to defend free speech is to exercise it—not just talk about it.
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Jane Byrne (1934–2014)
Jane Byrne, Fighting Jane. Mike Royko called her Mayor Bossy. She ran against the machine and squashed it, the whole goddamned machine.
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The Lonely Voice #29: Feels like the World, On a Story by Richard Bausch
Richard Bausch can take your head off with a plain sentence. He’s direct, no frills, no pirouettes. A writer who says what he means and not a word more.
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The Rumpus Interview with Corinne Goria
Author and veteran Voice of Witness editor Peter Orner sits down with Invisible Hands: Voices From the Global Economy editor Corinne Goria to talk about putting the book together, economic interdependency, and the complex human stories behind everyday items.
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The Lonely Voice #28: All Lives Are Interesting: My Father and Mavis Gallant
Alive, dead, what’s it matter to me, truly? I had her books then, I have her books now. Let others sing her praises today from the rooftops. For me, Gallant is all days.
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The Rumpus Interview with Chris Abani
Chris Abani sits down to talk about the dangers and seduction of fiction, literature as transformation, growing up in Nigeria, and how “our every justification is a story.”
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The Lonely Voice #26: Brief Thoughts on Alvaro Mutis’s “The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port Of Call”
The Lonely Voice was sorry to hear of the passing of the great Alvaro Mutis who died last month in Mexico City.
...moreThe Lonely Voice #25: Winter in September, On Breece D’J Pancake
Stories fail if you only read them once. You’ve got to meet a story again and again, in different moods, at different eras of your life.
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The Rumpus Interview with Leigh Newman
Balancing love and truth probably requires a very rigid, if not anal avoidance of glory and shame, when it comes to the portrayal of the people in the story—be they family members or characters.
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THE LONELY VOICE #24: ON KAWABATA, MORE SEX THAN SEX, THOUGHTS ON A PALM OF THE HAND STORY
Not long before his suicide in April 1972, Yasunari Kawabata did something that has perplexed me for years.
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The Rumpus Interview with Joe Mozingo
Journalist Joe Mozingo digs deep into his ancestral history to uncover the origin behind his surname, and discovers it’s one of the few African names to survive not only the Middle Passage, but the history of American slavery itself.
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THE LONELY VOICE #23: It Doesn’t Fit, It Will Never Fit, It Fits
Of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Haiti, and V.S. Pritchett…
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The Lonely Voice #22: RIP Richard Stern
Richard Stern has died. Stern was a short story writer, novelist, and essayist. I’ve always been particularly fond of Stern’s short stories, which are as emotionally raw as they are comic.
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The Lonely Voice #21: So Long Adobe Books
Another bookstore closes and San Francisco yawns. But Adobe Books on 16th Street, between Valencia and Guerrero isn’t another bookstore. It is a haven, a port for lonely souls, readers.
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The Lonely Voice #20: William Maxwell in the December Rain
This morning I threw Julian Barnes’ Sense of an Ending out the window of my car. I was reading at a red light. This occurred at approximately 10 A.M. at the corner of Mission Street and Como Avenue in Daly City, California. I was on my way to the Red Wing Store in the Westgate Shopping […]
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THE LONELY VOICE #19: On the Beauty of Not Writing… A Reluctant Homage to Juan Rulfo
I would like to be even more silent. The need to write thankfully only comes once in a while,
...moreIn Memory of Victor Martinez
Peter Orner remembers his friend, the late poet and novelist Victor Martinez.
...moreLONELY VOICE #18: Kafka the Dad (Part Three of Five Stray Thoughts on Kafka)
In an essay called “The I Without a Self,” W.H. Auden tells us about a rumor “which if true might have occurred in a Kafka story.” That is that Kafka, without knowing it, fathered a child.
...moreLONELY VOICE #17: In Love Again and Doomed (Part Two of Five Stray Thoughts on Kafka)
My lung was fair at least out there, here where I’ve been for the last fortnight. I’ve not been able to see the doctor. But it can’t be so bad considering for instance that I was able – holy vanity! – to chop for an hour and more without getting tired, and yet was happy, […]
...moreTHE LONELY VOICE #16: Between the Public and the Sky (Part One of Five Stray Thoughts on Kafka)
Whoever leads a solitary life and yet now and then feels the need for some kind of contact…
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Christopher Goffard
Wherever he went, the man of God carried his shotgun… Christopher Goffard’s You Will See Fire is a tense and harrowing look at the life and mysterious death – of a brave, at times, recklessly so – American priest living and working in Kenya.
...moreTHE LONELY VOICE #15: Be Aware of Your Own Ridiculousness, A Small Tribute to Václav Havel
That Václav Havel’s death was overshadowed by Kim Jong Il, that loopy coward, is a joke that might have made Havel, the writer, laugh. Idiot tyranny finally pays him back a little. Over New Year’s (yeah, a lonely voice likes to party), I re-read one of Havel’s plays, “Largo Desolato,”
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THE LONELY VOICE #14: Isaac Babel, Every Grief Soaked Word
I mourn him like a lost brother. I’ve no right to say this. It’s ridiculous. Yet some voices, we convince ourselves, can’t be lived without.
...moreTHE LONELY VOICE #13: Walser on Mission Street
I confess I like reading stories about people who are more depressed than I am. Other people’s misery has a way of lifting the soul a little. Happy stories? They’re even duller than happy families.
...moreCensus, 1980
An excerpt from Love and Shame and Love by Peter Orner, our November Rumpus Book Club selection (which is already receiving wonderful reviews, so now’s a great time to join the RBC if you aren’t already a member):
...moreTHE LONELY VOICE #12: Cheever in Albania Or The Lonely Voice Hates Travel Writing
There are few things more riveting than watching people gossip in a language you don’t understand.
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