Notable Online: 1/17–1/23
Literary events taking place virtually this week!
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Posts Tagged: peter orner
Notable San Francisco: 7/24–7/30
Literary events in and around the Bay Area this week!
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Notable NYC: 7/13–7/19
Literary events in and around NYC this week!
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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.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Chalk it up to a week where Twitter just felt like too much. Chalk it up to good ol’ nostalgia for the feel of a hefty book in your hands. Or maybe, just chalk it up to an aligning of stars that placed nine exceptional writers under the same roof. If you happen to have […]
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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 Rumpus Interview with Peter Orner
Writer and Rumpus columnist Peter Orner chats about compression in his work, the reappearance of characters, self-deception, and the stories we hold close.
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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.
...moreNotable SF: 2/17–2/23
Monday 2/17: The Porchlight Series continues with Long Walks on the Beach: The Dating Show, featuring stories by Rachel Balik, David Jordan, and Heather Marlowe. $15 adv/$20 door, 7 p.m. at Verdi Club. Tuesday 2/18: Peter Mountford, author of The Dismal Science, is in conversation with Peter Orner at The Booksmith. Free, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday […]
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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.”
...morePeter Orner’s Favorite Short Stories
I’ll say it: [“Idiots First”] is the most moving American story ever written. (Until I change my mind.) For online magazine Ozy, Rumpus columnist Peter Orner collects some of his very favorite short stories. They range from North American classics by Bernard Malamud and Alice Munro to work by Mexican author Juan Rulfo and murdered South […]
...moreHoliday Round-up
Two-sentence holiday fiction from Salon is fun and includes many Rumpus folks! You’ll find short fiction by Peter Orner, Matthew Specktor, Cecil Castellucci, Kelly Luce, Elliott Holt, and more! He was never sentimental about these things, being a Jew. Still, Wilshire Boulevard, with its plastic Santas and strung up sleighs, its gaudy “snowflakes” shedding tinsel in eighty degree […]
...moreVirginia Woolf and Failure
Peter Orner writes over at Salon about the beautiful summer of being 22, out on a lake and drinking some beers. He writes of languidly gliding along in a boat with some friends and gripping a copy of To The Lighthouse. Virginia taught him an important lesson that summer: the value of failure.
...moreStorytelling And Death With Peter Orner
“All stories are inherently suspect. You know that old, dumb crafty term: Reliable narrator? Show me a truly reliable narrator…Does one exist? Tom Brokaw? We’re all unreliable all the time. And I think storytellers should always go too far. In the story “Spokane” —as you say—Stacy goes too far, and still Barry buys it. I like to […]
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Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge by Peter Orner
Nina Schuyler reviews Peter Orner’s LAST CAR OVER THE SAGAMORE BRIDGE today in The Rumpus Book Review.
...moreAleksandar Hemon Reading
Aleksandar Hemon—Bosnian ex-pat, MacArthur genius grant recipient, and Rumpus interviewee—will be reading and signing books September 18th and 19th at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library in San Jose. The event on the 19th even puts Hemon in conversation with our very own Peter Orner! See event details here (for the 18th) and here […]
...moreMcSweeney’s Night of One Hundred Apocalypses
Quick! Think of some apocalypses! How many did you think of? For Lucy Corin, the answer is one hundred, and some others. That’s why she named her book One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses. To celebrate those myriad armageddons, come to McSweeney’s Night of One Hundred Apocalypses this Thursday at Amnesia in San Francisco! You’ll get […]
...morePeter Orner + Isaac Fitzgerald = Awesome Reading
Bay Area folks: Rumpus columnist Peter Orner will talk with Rumpus co-owner/former managing editor Isaac Fitzgerald about his upcoming collection of short stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge. It sounds like a Rumpus event, but it’s actually a Litquake event, and it’s happening tomorrow in San Francisco. Details here!
...morePeter Orner at Recommended Reading
She’d been ready to do her part for the war effort. Out of appreciation and gratitude and patriotism. All those hours on that terrible ship. Now what Seymour wanted was love, and she couldn’t possibly give that to him. For Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading series, Ann Beattie highlights “At the Fairmont,” a short short by […]
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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 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.
...moreWhen Fiction Won’t Let You Lie to Yourself
Why do we incorporate our personal lives into works of fiction? And how do we know when to stop? In a post for the New York Times‘s “Draft” series, “about the art and craft of writing,” Rumpus columnist Peter Orner recalls a long-ago event that his psyche can’t shake: as a child, he stole a pair […]
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