This was a new to me author but I am glad I took the plunge. What really shines in this collection is the novella at the end. Similar to Raymond Carver, Orner captures moments at the brink of happening.

I loved that these stories were very different, however tied in so well together. I was drawn to the main characters of the stories and how the stories came from different pov's and different narratives from each character. I would like to read more from this author in the future.

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.

'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

Maggie Brown and Other Stories manages to be a constant force of stimulation. Readers can expect to orient themselves not only in the stories presented, but also in consideration to how the length of the stories affect our capacity for retaining the seemingly minuscule, yet meaningful, flash of experiences in our own lives. Some stories range from flash fiction to short fiction and to, eventually, a novella packed into the book. While there is a narrative thread that lingers as the reader progresses through the book, Orner ultimately reinforces an emphasis on timing and spacing and how, almost, accidental life all seems. Thanks to the quick-witted dialogue between characters, they manage to be the backbone of the brief glimpses of the world Orner is crafting for the reader to notice. The choice between focusing on the ambiance of the work or the characters practically begs for the reader to consider a reread of this in the future, which I know for certain I will be doing.

Oh, what a splendid premise this constellation of stories is built on! Peter Orner isolates those turning point moments in our lives--and, time after time, story after story--nails the tragedies and triumphs of those trigger points. A luminous, smart, insightful collection--not to be missed.

The characters in Peter Orner's story collection, Maggie Brown and Others, 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.

In this powerful and virtuosic collection of interlocking stories, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist takes the form to new heights.

In his orchestral and moving new book, Peter Orner, a writer who "doesn't simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls" (New York Times Book Review), chronicles people whose lives are at inflection points. In forty-four compressed gems, he grips us with a series of defining moments. Whether it's a first date that turns into a late-night road trip to a séance in an abandoned airplane hangar or a family's memories of the painful mystery surrounding a forgotten uncle's demise, Orner reveals how our fleeting decisions between kindness and abandonment chase us across time. These stories are anchored by a poignant novella that delivers not only the joys and travails of a forty-year marriage but an entire era in small-town New England. Bristling with the crackling energy of life itself, Maggie Brown & Others marks the most sustained achievement to date for "a master of his form" (New York Times).

A Good, solid read.