“To read Peter Orner’s stories is to live simultaneously in so many lives: the reader’s memories intertwine with the characters’, the characters’ dreams resurface in the reader’s. People we have loved and lost, people we have encountered and missed—they wait for us to rediscover them in Orner’s stories. This book, exquisitely written, is as necessary and expansive as life.”
—Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
“No one captures the inner lives of vanished places and people like Peter Orner. Radiant, funny, full of wisdom and heart, his vibrant portraits pulse with authentic energy and are as perfectly tuned to his characters’ idiosyncratic speech as those of Grace Paley. His world shimmers with life.”
—Andrea Barrett, National Book Award–winning author of Ship Fever and The Air We Breathe
“The stories in Peter Orner’s Maggie Brown & Others feel eternally human, less like they’ve been written and rather like they’ve been drawn by patient hands from an ancient aquifer of memory, longing, and soulful knowing.”
—Adam Johnson, author of Pulitzer Prize winner The Orphan Master’s Son and National Book Award winner Fortune Smiles