Review by New York Times Review
JONATHAN SWIFT: His Life and His World, by Leo Damrosch. (Yale University, $22.) Swift (1667-1745) distinguished himself as novelist ("Gulliver's Travels"), satirist ("A Modest Proposal"), essayist, poet and political pamphleteer. Damrosch's commanding biography aims at sweeping away misconceptions about Swift's parentage, love life and moral and religious views - many of which were encouraged by Swift himself. THE dark road, by Ma Jian. Translated by Flora Drew. (Penguin, $17.) Ma Jian, whose previous books include the Tiananmen-era novel "Beijing Coma" and "Stick Out Your Tongue," a collection of stories about Tibet, here depicts the tragic effects of China's one-child policy in the rural hinterland. When a young peasant becomes pregnant without state permission, she and her husband take their first child, a daughter, and find refuge on a rickety houseboat on the Yangtze River. MISS ANNE IN HARLEM: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, by Carla Kaplan. (Harper Perennial, $16.99.) In this revelatory cultural history, Kaplan introduces the women - given the collective dismissive name "Miss Anne" - who became patrons of and participants in the Harlem Renaissance and raised hot-button issues of race, gender, class and sexuality in the bargain. LOOKAWAY, LOOKAWAY, by Wilton Barnhardt. (Picador, $16.) A family and a region are coming apart in Barnhardt's lacerating but affectionate satirical novel of the New South. Joseph B. (Duke) Johnston and his wife, Jerene, sit near the apex of society in Charlotte, N.C., but over the course of a decade they're sorely tried by a cast of characters including a rebellious, outspoken daughter; a closeted son; and Jerene's brother, Gaston, an acid-tongued, alcoholic novelist. JAPAN 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta. (Vintage, $16.95.) Surveying the internal mechanics of the Tokyo regime that planned and executed the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hotta finds a web of reckless incompetence and asks: Why did these men - military leaders, politicians, diplomats, the emperor - make a decision that was doomed from the start? LAST CAR OVER THE SAGAMORE BRIDGE: Stories, by Peter Orner. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.) In 52 stories, most no longer than a few pages, Orner presents a kaleidoscope of lives and experiences: lovers at a Wyoming hotel in 1912; a weary Communist in 1990s Prague; a daydreaming furniture salesman in 1940s New England. "Crystalline sentences...transform the ordinary elements of each story into an even more astonishing whole," Lauren Groff wrote here. WONDER OF WONDERS: A Cultural History of "Fiddler on the Roof," by Alisa Solomon. (Picador, $22.) Roaming across cultures and time periods, Solomon traces how and why the story of the beleaguered milkman Tevye, the creation of the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, was reborn as blockbuster entertainment and a global touchstone. Our reviewer, Marjorie Ingall, called "Wonder of Wonders" "as rich and dense as a chocolate babka."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 28, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Orner is an undisputed master of the short short story (his first collection, Esther Stories, 2001, has just been reissued), a form that even shapes his novels (Love and Shame and Love, 2011). The 51 distilled tales in this fizzing, chilling, and incisive collection are rich in emotional intricacy, drama, and devilish humor. Also in high evidence is Orner's fascination with fractious marriages and families under pressure especially in beautifully rendered stories set in his native Illinois and his gift for a touch of evil. A wife stands by her Bernie Madoffish husband. A man compulsively returns to a restaurant where a murder was committed. A father barely escapes a hurricane with his daughter. A woman recounts her lover's disappearance and macabre reappearance. A woman in Mexico City misses her sister, who is out of reach in Ohio. With an eye to history and the mythic nature of public figures, Orner imagines Isaac Babel's last moments and the struggles of Russian immigrants, the Kennedys, and Chicago mayors. This is a book of alchemical concentration, microcosmic resonance, arresting surprises, and stubborn tenderness.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In his second story collection, Orner (Love and Shame and Love) fires jewel-toned shards of fiction into a stunning whole. These tales, many of which are as short as a paragraph, jump back and forth between Fall River, Mass.; Chicago; Russia; the Czech Republic; South Dakota; and other places, as well as skipping across decades. Though most stand alone, several feature the relatives of Horace and Josephine Ginsburg, a family's "famous once-hads," whose failed Ponzi scheme ruined their relatives and the whole town. Divided into four parts-"Survivors," "The Normal," "In Moscow Everything Will Be Different," and "Country of Us"-the collection explores the heartache of the past; many stories feature men trying to make sense of the confusing adult world they inhabited as children. Perhaps the most tangible example is the title story, in which Horace's brother-in-law Walt Kaplan-a daydreaming furniture salesman in 1947-ruminates on the time in 1938 when he made it over the Cape Cod Canal just ahead of a hurricane. Impermanence and longing pervade the collection. In "Fourteen-Year-Olds, Indiana Dunes, Late Afternoon," one character "rises and stands in the shallow water and faces the beach as the waves break upon the shore, only to fall back toward her," just as Orner returns over and over to these crystallized moments. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Orner (Esther Stories; Love and Shame and Love) once again shows himself to be a master of compression. These stories, as short as a page and no more than four or five pages at most, form a constellation of key moments in the lives of an extended family of secular Jews with retail establishments and a penchant for local (i.e., Chicago) politics. One of the book's four sections takes its title from Chekhov's play, Three Sisters: "In Moscow Everything Will Be Different." Just as Chekhov's titular sisters never stop talking about Moscow but likewise never get there, Orner's characters have their own personal "Moscows"-the events in their lives that they cannot get past, that they must continuously relive and retell, like the father who rescues his daughter in a hurricane or the man who may or may not have witnessed a fire at the Coconut Grove Hotel. VERDICT Collectively, these events take on a mythic aspect that makes them linger and coalesce in the reader's mind. Perhaps by virtue of their length, Orner's stories force the reader to pay attention to those telling details, to unravel the sentences for all they are worth, and they are worth a lot.-Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Orner packs memorable characters--and occasionally some plot as well--into an exceptionally small space. The stories here range from the ultrashort (a single paragraph) to the merely moderately short (a few pages), and with more than 40 stories coming in at around 200 pages, many of them feel more like snippets or vignettes than fleshed-out narratives. The opening story, "Foley's Pond," introduces us to Nate Zamost, who missed a week of school when his sister, 2 1/2, drowned in the pond. On his return, Nate's friends try to cheer him up, though Nate makes them realize that he's the one who had taught his sister to crawl under the fence protecting the pond. In "Horace and Josephine," we meet the quirky title characters, aunt and uncle of the narrator. Josephine's welcome habit of dispensing $50 bills to her nephews is tempered by the fact that Horace earns his money through a Ponzi scheme, and although both are eventually disgraced, they're not willing to abandon their personal flamboyance. "The Poet," the shortest story in the collection, presents a poet who's recently had a stroke and who's sadly "trotted...out [as] a novelty act" to stumble through his poems on the podium. "Geraldo, 1986" takes us back to Geraldo Rivera's infamous, and embarrassing, attempt to pump up the discovery of Al Capone's "lost vault" at the Lexington Hotel into the new King Tut's tomb. Throughout the stories, Orner shows himself to be a master of the pithy phrase. A couple moves to South Dakota, for example, leaving the narrator to wonder "what heinous crime they must have committed in some other life to deserve exile in this moonscape among the earnest corn-fed." Pithy and evocative.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
