“Peter Orner is the publishing equivalent of a character actor: many readers might recognize his name but not quite be able to place his work….But among writers, Mr. Orner is a boldface name….Mr. Orner has found a distinct writing style for his fiction work: short, lyrical chapters that give his work a mosaic-like feel.”
—Reyhan Harmanci, New York Times
“The protagonist of this elegant yet intimate novel is ensnared in several webs: his Jewish family, Chicago politics, the culture of the ’80s.”
– New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
“The Chicago men and women who inhabit these pages exist in a world we recognize, where government is a s common a topic of thought and conversation as relationships, work, and kids. Drawing on his own history, Orner sifts freely through three generations of the Popper family, which moves from Chicago to Highland Park in the great suburban expansion after World War II. They’re “a modern ironical family” who say proudly, “We’re Democrats before we’re Jews.” ….As Alexander says, ‘I’m trying to write a sad story, a good, sad story.’ Orner has done that.”
—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Beautiful…. Think Saul Bellow (Chicago setting, rollicking Jewish-style comedy) mated with Chekhov (unassuming, devastating detail), set to the twangy thump of early Tom Petty. Now that promises quite a love child….Orner is the rare sort of writer who not only exactingly paints life’s bewilderments and suffering, but induces the experience itself in the reading…. Again, apt that Chekhov is invoked here, because Orner’s prose showcases a 21st-century version of the Russian’s unvarnished mastery….What drives this slideshow is inventiveness and craft – or art – condensed into seemingly simple images and stories. It’s the kind of nostalgiafest that finds you settling deeper into your cushion, leaving you slightly bereft when the last image gives way to a bright white screen.”
—Ted Weesner Jr., Boston Sunday Globe
“Love and Shame and Love is a rich and intriguing novel by a young master on how relationships, especially familial, both keep us afloat and sink us in equal measure.”
—“Top Shelf,” San Francisco Chronicle
“Orner’s second novel is a vibrant masterpiece about what it is to live in America—and what it is to live. Orner’s characters, the children, parents, and grandparents of a Jewish middle-class family, are exquisitely rendered, and though he is not always kind to them, they are easy to fall in love with, no matter their faults.”
—Emily Temple, Flavorpill.com (One of ten “Must Reads” for November)
“Mr. Orner turns the lives of ordinary middle-class people into comedy and tragedy.”
—Cynthia Crossen, WallStreetJournal.com
“Though Peter Orner is quite purposeful and precise in his nonlinear approach to storytelling, reading his latest novel Love and Shame and Love can evoke the sensation of unpacking a box full of memories in brief, frequently lovely chapters, vignettes, and letters, which ultimately coalesce to create a powerful and heartfelt family history….But this is less a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman or a sad chronicle of one family’s ascent and decline than it is an ambitious, kaleidoscopic novel of the Jewish experience in Chicago….Love and Shame and Love serves not only as an ode to the history of Chicago, but to Chicago literature itself. In Orner’s erudite, quotation-filled prose…there is, of course, more than a hint of Saul Bellow. The novel is…remarkable for the specificity of its characters and the settings they frequent….but the more universal story of thePoppers’ thwarted dreams and loves will likely resonate with those who have never set foot in Chicago or its northern suburbs.”
—Adam Langer, Chicago Tribune
Orner has written one of the year’s best novels. It leaves you certain that the Poppers aren’t fictional characters but real ones, waiting, impatiently, for your love.”
—Sheerly Avni, San Francisco Magazine
“Love and Shame and Love” begins with a bar mitzvah boy in Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz’s chambers, and bounces around, a pinball of memory, lighting up landmarks of Jewish life in the city and suburbs, from the Standard Club to Charlie Beinlich’s, always spot on…. Three generations of the Popper family flutter by in disarray, like scallop-edged black and white photos tumbling out….A beautifully written book about the ghosts of family hovering over us all.”
—Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times
“Each couple emblemizes the topical relationship of their day, but with such quirky specificity, their pain is your pain. It’s the details, in fact, where Orner seduces—That quiet parade of absolutely wacky and wonderful stuff that’s so odd, it must be real even if it’s fiction….Love and Shame and Loveis a slow burn with a firecracker at the end—the best kind of firecracker,w here you, not the characters, gasp in realization about what we really inhereit from the past.”
—Leigh Newman, “Book of the Week,” O, The Oprah Magazine.com
“Love and Shame and Love is the genuine article, a patchwork tome that feels neither taut nor forced, a novel about politics and law and traditions and progress and family and, of course, the title concepts: love and shame.”
—Kevin Morris, DBCReads.com
“The primary narrator, Alexander Popper, is the latest in a line of ever aspirational, but not fully realized, Jewish men whose failures haunt the lives of the next generation. Orner offers a cocoon as we accept the stories’ unsettling resolve toward the everyday lives of those who, like so many, remain on the ever-swinging pendulum between ‘Love and Shame and Love.’”
—Adera Causey, Chattanooga Times Free Press
“Even when the narrative slaloms back and forth through time and point of view, the shotgun pace keeps you deeply wedded to the characters, their struggles, their almost triumphs….Love and Shame and Love will break your heart, but in the best possible way.”
—Anna Pulley, San Francisco Weekly
“Orner has captured his characters in motion, bringing the past exquisitely and precisely to life even as he illuminates the present, timeless, struggle to make family, and life, meaningful. This is a big, smart, generous, important novel.”
—Antonya Nelson, author of Bound
“I consider Peter Orner an essential American writer… Esther Stories was among the best story collections of the last decade. Love and Shame and Love is among the best novels of this fresh new one.”
— Kevin Brockmeier, author of Brief History of the Dead and The Illumination.
“Love and Shame and Love is a marvel. It left me with that feeling we all crave when we read-the sense of wonder you wake with after a dream, realizing just how mysterious is this world.”
— Marisa Silver, Author of God of War
“Auden said that art is born of humiliation, which seems an ideal place to start appreciating Love and Shame and Love. A keen-eyed observer of American life and history, Peter Orner strips every layer of pretense from his characters, not to diminish but rather to reveal them. This is a real and memorable America.”
—Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.
