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| photo: Phoebe Orner | |
Peter Orner is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction and recipient of four Pushcart Prizes. He is chair of the English and Creative Writing Department at Dartmouth College. The Gossip Columnist's Daughter (Little, Brown, August 12, 2025) is the story of a contemporary writer's epic and comic quest, which weaves together family drama and a true-life unsolved case of a Hollywood starlet's death.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Revenge, it's about revenge.
On your nightstand now:
An old radio I can't get to work. Pills. Patrick Modiano's Ballerina. The First and Last King of Haiti by Marlene L. Daut. The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler. I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante. Edward Hirsch's new one, My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy. The Shared World by Vievee Francis. Berlin Stories by Robert Walser. More pills.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill. Has any book, kid book or not a kid book, explained human relations, or economics, any better?
Your top five authors:
Marilynne Robinson
John Edgar Wideman
Andre Dubus
Isaac Babel
Gina Berriault
Can I have six?
Juan Rulfo.
No, wait, seven.
Wright Morris.
Shit.
Eudora Welty.
Okay, one more.
Primo Levi.
Damn, can't leave off Mavis.
Mavis Gallant.
A belligerent drunk genius is yelling at me from the bookshelf.
Who have you turned to when you've got nothing? Huh? Who always bailed you out and gave you an idea when you had nothing, zero, zilch? And what happens when push comes to shove? You forget...
Faulkner Faulkner Faulkner.
Book you've faked reading:
A friend's book, can't say which.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Plains Song by the criminally forgotten Nebraskan Wright Morris. Not to be confused with a perfectly good book with a similar title by Kent Haruf called Plainsong. I talk about Morris's Plains Song to whomever will listen. Even so, I've been an extraordinarily unsuccessful evangelist as I don't think I've converted a single person to it. Even my New York Times piece didn't do any good. Though I did receive a nice note from a postal carrier who said she was a fan.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Patrick Modiano's Ballerina. Just yesterday. Gorgeous black cover with a ghost dancer on the cover. That said, I'd buy a new Modiano if the cover was a sewer cover.
Book you hid from your parents:
Like everybody else in the '80s, Forever by Judy Blume. I kept it under my mattress, not that my parents would have cared. I think I hid it just to be hiding it. Along with the Penthouse magazines I stole from my father's stash under his bed.
Book that changed your life:
Have I mentioned Plains Song by Wright Morris? A line on the first page goes like this: "Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe, in the teeth of the life we endure in the present?" I read it every year and every time the novel floors me. Nothing much happens, or at least not much is made of what happens; it's more about the passage of time. I've learned more about time from Plains Song than I have by the passage of actual time.
Favorite line from a book:
" 'Tis a muddle." Stephen Blackpool in Dickens's Hard Times. I probably mutter this line to myself 12 times a day. Isn't so much of every day a muddle?
Five books you'll never part with:
The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
Women in Their Beds by Gina Berriault
The Plain in Flames by Juan Rulfo
All Stories Are True by John Edgar Wideman
The Long-Winded Lady by Maeve Brennan
(6) My first edition of A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago by Ben Hecht. Out of my cold dead hands.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March. Somehow a requiem for the Austro-Hungarian Empire--and who really gives a damn about the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire--becomes an elegy for everything that's long gone, that we can't retrieve but can't stop thinking about.
Why do you read so many dead people?
Good question.
Why do questionnaires like this always cause stress and anxiety?
Because though my sales record would indicate that I am especially bad at it, I feel like I'm somehow performing for a sale. Like when you're in a store and the security guard looks at you askance like you are going to steal something and you feel guilty even though you haven't (at least not yet) intended to steal anything. You know what I mean? Or is this just me?