Peter Orner
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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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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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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 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.
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The 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.