Maggie Brown & Others

by Peter Orner

National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and "master of his form" (New York Times) Peter Orner returns with a powerful new collection.

Maggie Brown & Others is a stunning and deeply moving array of shorter-than-short stories, spanning from California to Chicago and from Massachusetts to southern Africa, following a cast of characters coming to terms with their situations and struggling with the weight of memory. A preteen grieves over his involvement in the death of his two-year-old sister; an unknown and dying beat poet reflects on his life and career; a young girl helplessly watches a deer sink into a quickly rising swamp, frozen and already aware of the ways in which the moment will etch into her mind forever. Several of Orner's characters grapple with crises of identity and intense loneliness, finding relief in questionable, sometimes horrifying ways.
Peter Orner brilliantly captures the human experience in these singular and yet universally felt vignettes. Maggie Brown & Others is a composite portrait of what's like to be a person in the world, and the heaviness and lightness that makes up a life.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, American, Short Story Collection, Anthologies

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 2, 2019

About the author

Peter Orner was born in Chicago and is the author of three novels: Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006), and his most recent, Love and Shame and Love (Little, Brown, 2011) which was recently called epic by Daniel Handler, "...epic like Gilgamesh, epic like a guitar solo." (Orner has since bought Gilgamesh and is enjoying it.) Love and Shame and Love is illustrated throughout by his brother Eric Orner, a comic artist and illustrator whose long time independent/​alt weekly strip The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green was made into a feature film in 2008. Eric Orner's work is featured this year in Best American Cartoons edited by Alison Bechdel.

A film version of one of Orner's stories, The Raft, is currently in production and stars Ed Asner.

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller, won the Bard Fiction Prize. The novel is being translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and German. The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo is set in Namibia where Orner lived and worked in the early 1990's.

Esther Stories was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award.

Orner is also the editor of two non-fiction books, Underground America (2008) and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives (co-editor Annie Holmes, 2010), both published by McSweeney's/​ Voice of Witness, an imprint devoted to using oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. Harper's Magazine wrote, "Hope Deferred might be the most important publication out of Zimbabwe in the past thirty years."

Orner has published fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, The Southern Review, and various other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and the Pushcart Prize Annual. Orner has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations.

Orner has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop (Visiting Professor, 2011), University of Montana (William Kittredge Visting Writer, 2009), the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College (2009) Washington University (Visiting Hurst Professor, 2008), Bard College (Bard Fiction Prize Fellowship, 2007), Miami University (Visting Professor, 2002), Charles University in Prague (Visting Law Faculty, 2000). Orner is a long time permanent faculty member at San Francisco State where he is an associate professor. He would like to divide his time between a lot of places, especially San Francisco and Chicago.

Reviews

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rating... REVIEW TO FOLLOW...
some of the shortest-shortest- stories I’ve ever read: AND.... I LIKED THEM!!!
A few were sooooo outstanding-it was worth the whole enchilada!!

Buddy read with Violet! 💕

UPDATE: review:
It’s pretty obvious that short stories are structured differently than novels, which is apparent in
“Maggie Brown & Others”.
Regardless the length or crafting style, what’s important to me, is that I feel something.
I did…. I felt lots of somethings.

Peter Orner’s ‘words-of-authenticity’ about the joys and pain in our world reveal how intimately
cruelty and kindness unfold.

These stories show different streams of life experience - both splendid and irreparably sad. Many of the stories focus on the characters’ inability to see themselves accurately — or their past failures —
Memory feels precious, important, and fragile. It’s the characters visions of their past which manifest as suffering losses in their present.

Writing a review for 44 short stories and a novella (from a writer of extraordinary gifts) — is tricky business — ha!

A few of the stories knocked me on my ass….
Such as….
***Ineffectual Tribute to Len***
“He’d been my boss at summer camp. He was one of those people who pop up randomly
And change everything, you can’t imagine any story of your life, lame as it might be, told without them. Len was one of the first people to notice something, anything in me”.

“Len’s loyalty to camp was so strong that even when he was breaking the rules, and he spent his days breaking camp’s rules, it was his way of respecting—loving—the institution for instituting the rules in the first place”.

“As much as Len talked, and he talked and talked, I always thought that at the root, beneath the ceaseless cascade of stories, exhortations, bullshit, sayings, advice, encouragement, teasings, there was a silence. He rarely got personal, and when he did, it had more to do with something he wanted us to understand than something he wanted to tell us about himself”.

“I loved the man. The want wasn’t entirely delusional. I wanted people who never knew Len to remember him. Does this make any sense?”.
There is much more to this story -leaving out spoilers —
But….
It was my favorite.

THIS NEXT STORY MADE ME LAUGH

***Gus’s Highland Spa***:
Two old geezers were shooting-the-breeze…
“Can’t there be a day of nothing else?”

“No Jews, Alf says”.
“No Jews what? Walt says”.
“No Jew ever wrote a history of Fall River. Written or unwritten”.
“That’s true”.
“But why would they? Alf says. Not our town. Never has been, never will be”.
“I’m born here, I’ll die here, Walt says. It’s not my town?”
“No.”
……. more to this story — It felt good to laugh!!!

THIS NEXT STORY kinda made me ache —

***Erwin and Pauline***
“Erwin never recounted any memories himself. But when someone else told a story, he’d say, softly, ‘I I do remember that, I do’. Then he’d go home and fall back into the life he lived, back to that apartment off Irving Park Road, back to his rounds at the high school. And the family remain grateful, grateful that he was still able to hold down a job, still able to care for himself”.

Erwin was a “little slow” — (just a “little” slow)

I’m leaving out parts of this story on purpose — but Pauline enters. (A woman who ends up teaching at Interlochen Arts School in Michigan—the same school our daughter attended) ..
I felt sad-joy-sad again!

THIS STORY GOT ME IN MY FRICKIN GUTS: > Anger!

***The Captain***
For me— this was the most painful stories of the bunch.
A man in his 30’s —a High School English teacher sold drugs on the side —
One night — two High School Juniors were invited into his house —

THIS STORY DID NOT MOVE IN THE DIRECTION I THOUGHT….

The narrator of the story asks:
“Why is the Captain—on the couch sleeping—more vivid to me than some of the people I see every day?”
“We knew that, whatever happened, we wouldn’t be caught dead begging anybody’s crumbs into our thirties. At least that much had been drummed into us. Our mothers had whispered we’d be kings. Of what if didn’t matter.
I won’t say more ……but…..
NO OTHER STORY MAKES ME MORE ANGRY than this one!!!

TONS more stories and a moving novella — EXCELLENT collection…
Read about relationships, marriages, divorce, miscarriage, infidelity, stoners, aging, illness, (physical and mental), love, lies, secrets, friendships, loss, memories, abuse, mediocrity, sins, regrets, ordinary and extraordinary, trials and tribulations, Fall Creek, Massachusetts, California, Chicago, Michigan, wives, ex-wives, music, “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart, The 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, …etc….
longings, death>>>> contemporary life — human frailties — memorable characters — a small town — engaging dialogue - insightful - with much to reflect on!


This was my first time reading Peter Orner. I plan to read more of his work.
His short stories —about humanity - tragedy and sadness —have glimpses of hope and happiness, too.
My spirits were simply lifted by the experience of ‘truth’.

I’m happy to share —this was a buddy read with Violet — Adding pleasure to the joy-of-reading!!!
At times --(many times) - I was imagining Violet reading her book in the UK. I love reading with Violet —and can’t wait to read her review!
She and I will continue chatting about these stories -the themes -the moods - etc.


One last thought came out of my reading this book —
…… “what IS the big difference between short stories and novels anyway?” —
And….
….. “which books (novels) have had the BEST ENDINGS? And why does it feel as if the endings in short stories matter less to me than in novels? (Just something I’m thinking about)


Peter Orner….Happy to be a new fan!!!!

[Richard Derus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Real Rating: 4.5* of five

All the stars, all the stripes, all the band fanfares for Walt Kaplan is Broke: A Novella! The Chicago stuff, Lighted Windows, not so much; the thematic unity there was love, looking for love, running into it without meaning to, and that's pretty much why short stories get a bad rap from most folks because, in the end, who friggin cares.

Renters: A Sequence was affecting as a group of minor stories, cohesive in their central theme of exploring the disaster and misery of a marriage foundering under the skyscraper-tall waves of mental illness; the issue for me, the reason it wasn't as rock-me-back beautiful as Walt Kaplan was, was that the characters were sketched in thin, spidery lines instead of bold, dark strokes.

The Cali stuff, Come Back to California, was okay, I guess, but not excellent the way the Fall River, Mass, Jews in Castaways were. Startlingly rich and layered characterizations in quite compact stories, so compact as to be fleeting in some cases. The best single story in the book is in this section: "Bernard: A Character Study" was a peak read for me, a simple and direct evocation of a simple and direct person's time on this Earth.

The micro-ness of the fictions works best in the novella. They are a perfect meal made of tapas, orchestrated to present a dozen views of the tale; they each have a flavor impact outsized to their physical page presence, but contribute their unique qualities to a whole and satisfying conclusion to one's story hunger:

And think of the '60s, when the whole country got a little wilder and we joined in and did it twice a night? You remember, Sar? Now twice a night would be like rising from the dead, but history is history, and if not set down on paper it should at least be ruminated upon. Sarah and Walt Kaplan, one night, more than once, two entirely separate fornications.

Now, for a philosophical as well as a practical question: Why didn't we just push the beds together and leave them there? Ah, because that would be a lie, no? The nature of the reaching, the nature of the whispered entreaties, a thousand variations on the same invitation, is that both reaching of the hands and the question in question invariably lead to moments of complete incompleteness. Because the upshot of coupling is uncoupling. The essence of association is disassociation. Because you can fuck till you're blue, but at a certain point the inevitable nightly drawing apart happens for good, am I right or am I right? Spell it out again: the retreat once again to separate beds attains a cementation that precludes any further you wannas. After a certain point you wanna? is no longer an invitation for rumpus; it's a cry from oblivion.

It's to your taste, or it isn't; but it *is* beautiful.

[Violet wells · Rating 3 out of 5]

In one of his stories, the author has his narrator say this: "Horizons can't ever be reached no matter how many words you lard on a novel. The attempt at closure is inherently dishonest."

That's true but the magic of every brilliant novel is that it creates the illusion in time that it isn't true. So, there's something a bit shifty about this declaration, especially as it's the impetus for the abbreviated form of the countless stories in this volume. Few stories are more than a couple of pages long. Isolated moments in a life, often at a point where the life in question stalled.

Recently I read a number of unfinished stories by Katherine Mansfield. They too were like snapshots of stories. And they were unfinished because she never quite found the inspiration to complete them. There's often the feeling a similar problem was besetting Peter Orner. He can write very well and there's some fabulous one-liners. And had this book consisted of only the first hundred or so pages I would have found it interesting as an experiment. But over 300 pages of these two-page stories began to seem like obstinate self-indulgence, a writer trying to fight his way out of writer's block. And his subject, the stalled life, often seemed like a mirror image of his own dilemma as a (stalled) writer.

I was excited to see there was a novella towards the end of this book. I assumed I'd now be privy to what he can do with an extended narrative. What ensued was pretty much the same technique extended with the same characters which bored me to the point of abandoning it half way. This was a buddy read with Elyse who enjoyed it more than I did - no doubt helped by her greater familiarity with the locations and social milieus - this is a very esoterically American book. There's enough here to make me curious about what he might do with a novel but these attempts to find a new form for the short story made me think of an architect designing countless porticos bereft of any complimentary building.

[Jennifer nyc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Little gems, these stories (some very short) made from the stuff of life, the small moments that matter, the people that give life depth and color. They are full of laugh-out-loud dialogue, yet left me with a film of sorrow.

The collection ends with a novella that’s broken up into stories like snapshots, following a couple through life’s stages. That’s not to say the snapshots aren’t richly explored or devoid of emotion - they are not.

This collection is deeply moving, and also paints a portrait of a town at a time, and all the people in it.

I listened to the audio in short visits over time, and I think that may have enhanced my enjoyment.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have not read many short story collections and am just acquiring a taste for this abbreviated writing form. In my opinion, the following quote reflects Orner's thinking and what I am slowly realizing about short stories. "The last period of the last sentence of a story isn't a full stop; it's a horizon. It's not about word count or pages. That's a smothering way of thinking. We're talking about the quest for infinity here. Horizons can't ever be reached no matter how many words you lard on a novel. The attempt at closure is inherently dishonest. But a story! One that ends but doesn't end, that's infinity, immortality." These words are spoken by a struggling short story writer in the excellent story "Ineffectual Tribute to Len".

Maggie Brown and Others moves across the country, beginning in Section I in California and ending with a novella set in Fall River, Mass., the decaying city of Orner's childhood. Throughout the stories the characters exemplify the frailties of humans; who we are or who we think we are, what we know or don't know about those closest to us, our sense of place or our lack of it, and the unrealized significance of a particular moment. All are evidenced with wisdom and humor. It would be hard not to relate to one of Orner's characters in some way.

For me, the novella crystallized this collection. Walt, the main character, was so genuine. Although financially poor, he was rich in many ways. His strong sense of place, his love for his city and for his wife came through loud and clear in his thoughtful musings. The conversations Walt had with his friends and Sarah were so real I could hear them perfectly as I chuckled.

I heard Mr. Orner interviewed on a podcast which inspired me to try this collection. I am very glad I did.

2 quotes

"We know as much about what goes on in other people's heads as we do in other people's houses. Closed blinds, front walks, faces, eyes, all tools of the hiding trade."

on eating lobster

"Only human beings could make a party out of boiling a few fellow creatures alive and cracking their backs open."

[Martie Nees Record · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genre: Literary Domestic Fiction
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date: July 2, 2019

A writer friend of mine, Diane Ledet, author of "Bookwinked," recommended this book to me. I am grateful for her suggestion since she introduced me to an author who captures the human condition so well in just a few short sentences. This is the sort of book I love to read. Regarding his 2001 book, “Esther Stories,” the NYT Book Review said that “Orner doesn't simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls." The same could be said about his latest book, which includes a novella and 44 short stories. And by short, I mean short. Many of the stories are around two pages long. Still, they get under your skin. All of the stories tend to be melancholy with an emphasis on what it means to be alive.

The opening story, “The Deer,” is one of my favorites in the collection. A girl watches a deer become stuck in the mud after a mountain lion chases it into a lagoon. Feeling pinned, she sits down on a log and watches the tide rise, knowing it will eventually be over the deer’s head. When the water is up the deer’s chest, she finally gets back on her bike and leaves. She just couldn’t stand to watch anymore. As the reader, I wanted to jump into the pages and rescue the poor creature. The story’s power comes from the girl’s helplessness in not being able to save the deer. Most of us have been in that terrible position of watching someone we love suffer and/or die knowing that there is nothing we can do to give them aid. It’s that agony that Orner manages to nail with limited words—very impressive.

The bittersweetness of "Ineffectual Tribute to Len" drew me in immediately. A grad student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop drives all night in a snowstorm to meet one last time with his former boss, Len, who is now dying of AIDS. The grad student hopes to write a book about Len because he was “one of the first people to notice something, anything, in me.” I feel confident that all writers will relate to the student who can’t manage to move his manila folder full of notes into a novel. Still, Orner brings hope into the story. The student does manage to write a different novel than the one that he intended to write. He honors Len’s spirit with no mention of the source of the book’s inspiration. Without spelling it out, Orner demonstrates to his readers how something awful can transform into something positive, even if it is simply a novel of thankfulness.

Interestingly the story that is my least favorite is the book’s title story, “Maggie Brown.’’ The short revolves around the narrator’s college girlfriend. “A few years ago I saw her at a Minneapolis airport…She looked right at me, didn’t know me from Adam.” That line alone perfectly describes the sadness one can feel when they have been forgotten. My issue is that I didn’t get as obsessed with the characters as I did in the other stories. Still, it is a very good short. Maybe, I was simply expecting too much since it is the title story.

My only true criticism with the shorts is that most of them left me so connected to the protagonist that I wished each story was longer. My wish was granted in the novella of interlinked short stories revolving around the forty-year marriage of Walter and Sarah Kaplan. The Kaplans are a constantly squabbling Jewish American couple who own a furniture business. Suddenly I am reading humor and by this time I needed to laugh. The novella can have a melancholy feel, but there are many moments of comic relief that take the edge off. Orner’s dialogue is similar to the Jewish humor of Philip Roth. He summarizes life’s annoying and painful moments while mixing it up with zingers. Walter says, “I dreamed you buried me in the old cemetery out on Fish Road.” Sarah asks, “Fish Road where all the ancient Jews are?” Walter replies, “You think we're immune from becoming ancient Jews?” I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys literary fiction and is willing to think about their own life because Orner will force you to reflect. I for one will be seeking out his previous work.

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[Jennifer (Insert Lit Pun) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quiet "wow" of a collection

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Orner is a master of the very short story, and the juice he can get out of a two pager, a four pager, a single page is uncanny. I had to change my focal length to absorb their impact. They're like a shred of newspaper on the ground one reads at a bus stop, only superbly composed and with a masterful intent. Exactly what he's doing frequently takes me--a novelist of the 'throw it all in' school--back through it again, this time with pencil in hand, to pull apart the turns he takes, the clues to his intentions. They're postcards from lives of few expectations, people very far from 'where it's at', stories about moments when things might have turned out differently, the way a drowning person might et just a glimpse of the sun just before they go back under, never to rise again. The comparison with Carver is apt for milieu, but more poignant than Carver, and very light handed.

The novella which ends the collection--a series of very short stories collectively illuminating the life of middle aged, failed furniture salesman Walter Kaplan, victim of a recent heart attack, and his wife Sarah--the beauty of their love for each other just shines out of the matrix of small town failure, and the close knit group of their friends, a community in a dying town, holding each other up, sharing each other's lives, is warmer than the the earlier stories, and Walt is a Fall River Leopold Bloom, though Sarah unlike Molly still loves her guy. Just the way they cross the divide between their twin beds more often than not is a perfect metaphor.

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd never heard of Peter Orner before, much less read him, but the New York Times put me on to him (and many other authors), which is why I keep the New York Times around. Anyway, as is true of any short story (plus a final novella) collection, mixed results, but in this case mostly a very fine mix. This isn't Orner's first rodeo, as they say.

One bit I especially liked was a riff on Chekhov (short story masters riff on short story masters, I guess). This is from the story "Ineffectual Tribute to Len":

"All hail Chekhov. If done right, he tells us, a story never ends. A story: lurks. A story, a good story, is just out of reach, always. Wake up in an unfamiliar darkness, in a room you don't seem to recognize. Flip on the light. Nothing there. It's your room again. But didn't you feel a presence in the dark? The presence of someone you once knew? Someone you once loved? All these years I've been deluding myself, carrying around this folder as if one day it would grow covers and a binding. So simple, Len's a story."

Then the narrator decides to write his publisher, Little, Brown and Company, about his revelation:

"You say stories don't sell, and God knows I have no reason to doubt you (I've seen the numbers on my story collections and they aren't pretty; I know I'm basically a charity case), but don't you see? It's what Chekhov teaches. The last period of the last sentence of a story isn't a full stop; it's a horizon. It's not about word count or pages. That's a smothered way of thinking. We're talking about the quest for infinity here. Horizons can't ever be reached no matter how many words you lard on a novel. The attempt at closure is inherently dishonest. But a story! One that ends but doesn't end, that's infinity, immortality, right there..."

Cool, no? And then, to continue the philosophical turn, we get a similar vein in the novella, "Walt Kaplan Is Broke," where the protagonist, Walt, is talking about writing his own History of Fall River (the Massachusetts setting and his hometown) with a friend:

"'Any history will sit on the shelf and eventually molder with the other relics. Why? Alf, you ask me why.'"

'Cause books get moldy in our humid climate.'"

'Because they aspire to completeness! They've got a first page and a last page. That's the killer right there. The beauty, I won't say brilliance, of Kaplan's history is that its essence is the essential fact of its incompleteness..."

It may sound odd to say as much, but Walt speaks for Orner's book, too: It aspires to incompleteness. The thread Orner is needling is writing stories that end on the page only. In the head of the reader, he hopes, they continue. They resonate with a strain of incompleteness that makes a reader think. Wonder. Ruminate. Or marvel, "How'd he do that?"

Yeah. Like so. In a way that would make Chekhov proud, I'll wager.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 5 out of 5]

via my blog: https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/
'Amazing what our bodies are designed to take.'

Amazing what our hearts and souls are designed to take too. This is a hell of a collection of connected stories by Peter Orner. I was blown away by all of the characters because they resembled reality too much, the pain of being alive, our insecurities, our curiosity about family members closest to us, our assumptions about others that diminish them as people. There are stories about the fire of youth and the desires that flow beneath our skin, how hungry our hormones make us, how did we survive all that want? Later in life, the ache of it all, the self-pity. You can’t feel too sorry for the characters because when you do, you are snapped back into reality by lines such as this “He’d grown up poor, he said. That’s novel? The mass of humanity lives a world away from a hot bath.” I am always hungry for short stories that throw the reader right into a town, a house, a family, any situation where I can immediately understand the score because the writing is saturated with insight and emotions, the atmosphere rich, going between light and heavy. This line “He’d written, he told her, about flower children because they made him laugh. Spent my life trying to get clean and these kids can’t get dirty enough.” That is gold, it sums up so much with a few choices words. Writing at its best. Truly, I was hooked.

My heart could break, my breath catch with a line describing our narrator’s mother, about her hands while she played the piano because he humanized her so tenderly in The Case against Bobbie. We dance through time, through our own hearts, first memories, beginnings, endings and all the decisions we face each day simply because we exist. How we live with what remains when death decides to court us. Wealth to poverty, love to the absence of it, youth to old age, and the curiousness of the parts we all play in between. Why do some images stick while some are diluted or fade away entirely? How strange to be a human being, what imperfect creatures we are.

Yes, yes add this collection to the top of your TBR list! These short stories swallowed me as much as a full length novel.

Publication Date: July 2, 2019

Little, Brown and Company

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What kind of word magician writes a novella in short stories that leaves me in tears when a character dies? These snippets pieced together a life, a community. And I hated to leave.

I had heard a lot of buzz about Peter Orner's Maggie Brown & Others. And it was on my pre-approved NetGalley shelf. I squeezed it into my reading schedule.

The early short stories captivated me. Twice I quoted the book for David Abrams' Sunday Sentence on Twitter, where people post 'the best sentence' they read that week:

An old boyfriend once told her that she had a way of using magnanimity as a weapon.

Shouts in the dark. Maybe that's the best we can do to reach beyond ourselves.

I noted lovely sentences such as, "Her shoulder blades are still shaped like the prows of rowboats." And pointed insights like "There's something so ruthless about optimism."

The diverse stories are insightful and I loved meeting all of these people, learning so much about them through these small slivers of life.

In the fourth section of the book, Walt Kaplan is Broke: A Novella, we meet a good man with a small life, a broke man rich in love. The stories jump through time, building the story of Fall River in New Jersey and the remnant community of Jews--those who have died and "the ones waiting for the opportunity."

You have to love people like Walt and Sarah Kaplan who ask "you wanna" and then push their twin beds together, never having considered purchasing a queen bed.

I could return to these stories again and again.

In one story a writer is told there is no money in writing short stories! I would guess that is true, but I am sure glad writers like Orner still employ the form.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Orner has been a favorite since I discovered him years ago via his novel Love Shame Love. But this is the first of his collections that I have read in a long time and I wonder what took me so long. This collection is divided into sections each containing a series of linked stories, all connecting in some manner to Orner's own life in some way. He came of age in Chicago, went to University in Michigan, lived for a while in northern California and currently teaches in New England (Dartmouth, to be specific). But whereas the stories tie together, they are each meaty and rich despite their brevity. He recently said that a story doesn't need to be bloated into a novel in order to be effective, that the amount of words necessary to tell a story need not be excessive. True. With his talent at brevity with punch, like George Saunders and Tobias Wolfe, he is one of the masters of the craft.

[Jonathan Maas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Putting this review here as a placeholder. Considering every other Peter Orner book I have read is 10 stars out of 5, Maggie Brown gets 5 stars on average.

But yeah I am sure it is 10 stars out of 5 like every other Peter Orner book haha.

Look forward to reading it when it comes out!

[Paul Wilner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful collection! My interview with the author, Peter Orner, for ZYZZYVA magazine, is linked below:

https://www.zyzzyva.org/2019/07/10/qa...

[JimZ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stories: I would give the stories 3-3.5 stars (as I remember them, there were so many).
I hated the novella…a series of one-liner jokes cobbled together.

[Sonya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The characters in this story collection oftentimes feel disconnected from the roles they seem to be stuck in. The stories take place from 1950 to the 1990s, with the distinct sensibility of a pre-technology era. Many of the stories are about family who are cast out from their expected roles due to poor luck, addiction, and mental illness. Orner's prose pulls on threads of loneliness and exhaustion, and within the collection's thematic sections, the brief stories connect to one another.

There are two sections of this book that feature one narrator. In short glimpses, this unnamed man, who is a writer, explores the plights of people in his family, aunts and uncles, town criminals. Later, we see him look back at his education, then his life with a wife. These micro-stories, which are not conventionally formed, are vivid and poignant. And the narrator uses language that feels conversational. He says of an aunt, "[she] was in her late forties when she moved back home. The word was that she was "a little off." Nobody by my father went as far to say she was crazy. He'd tell anybody who listened what a loon his sister was." In a sense, the writer's whole childhood and young adulthood come alive on the page. The way he tells his stories confer an understanding of our common humanity, a love, even for the castaways of modern life. This is the collection's most ardent theme.

In addition to affection for the disaffected, religion, commerce, and sexual connections are important, too. These themes come up often in the novella "Walt Kaplan is Broke." Relying on some history from earlier stories, the novella takes place in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1977. Walter Kaplan has bypassed death by cardiac arrest, leaving him to evaluate his whole life, marriage, friendships, and the history of the town itself. Walt has been a business failure, and was depressed before he nearly died. When he wakes up, he has to find his place among the living.

Orner has the ability to give a skeleton of details about a character's life and trust that the reader can fill in the gaps and leap from story to story to understand an overarching message about our pasts. It's a rare talent and these stories are its evidence.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those short story collections of the genre I refer to as "a drunk man having a terse conversation with a funeral director." Some real sadness and beauty here and the stories are short enough that when you run across a character you don't care about, you don't have to spend much time with them. The closing novella is sweet and gorgeous.

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Maggie Brown & Others” is the kind of book that makes you understand the meaning behind the ordinary occurrences of everyday life. Short stories are a form especially well-suited to covering the quotidian — and Peter Orner does it masterfully. I found this book unsatisfying in a good way. The stories often end with a character stuck in a deep place of longing, questioning how they ended up where they are. Very true to life.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like being stabbed in the heart by a sharp little switchblade approximately 57 times. Orner is terrific with dialogue; I've never read someone who so perfectly captures the self-interruptions and trailings-off of real conversation. His characters often say that talking gets in the way of understanding, but in his stories, the talking is the understanding.

[Lorraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

An eclectic collection of snippets of stories. You can't even call them "short stories" because most of them are just scenes, and yet they contain volumes of information about the characters and their situations and life. It's as though the author writes scenes, perfects them, but they never grow into full stores of their own. Or, maybe, they are scenes that got cut from longer strokes, great in and of themselves, but didn't offer anything to some other purpose. The refuse of a good novel. Some of the scenes are really random, bizarre that someone would live then, let alone write them, and try that's what makes them all the more poignant.
The novels at the end, about Walt Kaplan, furniture salesman, very moving and real.
Great writing. Reminds me of Thomas King at times, with the dry wit and the way characters would converse by sending to talk past each other, but somehow still connecting.
Profound and absurd simultaneously.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy crap--a truly remarkable read. I love a good short story collection and this is one of the best I've ever picked up. The first few stories are disparate, and they become increasingly connected as the collection progresses, and the last 100 pages or so is essentially a novella. Some of the stories are shorter than I've seen before (1-2 pages), but the author packs so much into as little as one page. At one point, I was staring for 5 minutes, crying, not wanting to leave the page. I am in awe. This is so, so good.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic collection of short stories and one well written novella. Great quotes, characters and plot smashed into a few pages of each story. Orner’s character’s dialogue is punchy, accurate and fun to read. If you like collections of short stories, this book comes highly recommended😁.

[Rita Ciresi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unique and compelling character-driven stories. The prose crackles with energy.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collections are always a mixed bag. Some of these are great, some forgettable. Good writing throughout.

[Zea · Rating 5 out of 5]

:’)

[Tyson Mueller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought the ending novella was a little weak, but the short stories the proceeded it were great. In a few pages the author is able to sketch characters that have more depth and nuance than many authors can accomplish in an entire novel. I also enjoyed how many of the stories are told about, or around, the same characters, but don't try to force the continuity.

[Cindy Holland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely love this book. Every chapter/section left me both satisfied and yet wanting more. What a treasure trove of fantastic vignettes with rich character sketches and beautiful sentiments! It's a different kind of genre and refreshing. Love it.

[A Foster · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me, this book was a long slog. I’ve never been big on short story collections, simply because I prefer getting more immersed in the characters. To call these short stories would not be accurate in my mind. Most are just a few pages long each and could be more accurately described as vignettes, to my way of thinking. They are well written, with interesting characters, but they feel like pitches for a book, or a movie in that they give just a taste of a much bigger story. I sometimes wanted more, if it was really interesting. But I often was happier to move on to anything else. Toward the end of the book, there is a novella, written in short chapters that feel a lot like the rest of the book, but the stories are about one man and those around him. For me, this was the payoff for not giving up on this collection. Perhaps this book is brilliant and I just didn’t get it. Three stars for obviously talented writing.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

I respect this collection and enjoyed reading it, though a day later, very little of it stays with me.

There are 44 stories, of which only eight are longer than five pages, and I liked those far better than the brief takes in the others. There were only four stories I noted as as I read as being really good, and all were in this longer group.

In one of these, "Ineffective Tribute to Len," Orner writes: But a story! One that ends but doesn't end. that's infinity, immortality, right there." That applies to most (perhaps all) these stories, but it f does not work for me. The stories simply did not stay with me, thus no immortality. (Oddly, it did work when I red Lydia Davis). My experience was perhaps the opposite -- a flash of recognition, an acknowledgement of the author's ability, and there my involvement with most of the stories ended.

There is one broad overview which has lasted. Many of the stories center around Jewish life in the U.S. (maybe limited to New England, I don't remember...) and in areas apart from the major urban centers. Collectively, this gave me a sense of a shared experience by the characters, amplified by the novella at the end, which while in the same style of brief glimpses was still effective and moving.

On the other hand, I got a bit weary with the preoccupation with college settings, and had a sense of Orner as a wandering academic (which, of course, may not be true) and found it ab it of a distraction.

Overall, this is a bittersweet collection which has an overtone of sadness and poignancy, and a compelling respect for the characters depicted. It's well worth reading, even if I did not find it quite a home run.

[Kristen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I can’t speak for the whole book since I only made it about halfway through. After reading lots of great reviews of Orner’s storytelling ability, I really wanted to like this book. However, in a book comprised of 44 short stories, I found almost every single one (that I made it through) was heteronormative, lacked any kind of diversity in its characters, and overall was shockingly male-centric. Every female character that I can recall was either manic-pixie dream girl type, a nag to the male main character, or so secondary that they only served to fill the gaping spot where an actual female character should have existed. Most stories incorporated no women at all.

I can’t remember if I decided to call it quits when the author fetishized homosexuality through a crass story of a man having an inappropriate relationship with a patient at a mental hospital where he worked, or when he romanticized urinals for an entire story. Hard pass, especially in 2019.