PETER ORNER

As a work of African provenance, ''The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo" will take its place alongside Saul Bellow's ''Henderson the Rain King" and Graham Greene's ''The Heart of the Matter." But it is a book unlike any I have ever read, a miraculous feat of empathy that manages to unearth -- in the unlikeliest of spots -- the infinite possibilities of the human heart. With this staggering debut novel, Orner has joined the first rank of American writers.

- The Boston Globe

Orner's thrift only heightens the longing that vibrates throughout the novel. He has written a starvation diary about desire, with as much sexual tension as a bodice-buster...But they do touch, and try to connect; Mavala begins the affair by laying her head on Larry's stomach. The gesture seems almost lurid after half a book of drought. Then, lest the physical facts disappoint, the narrative turns chaste. We have only flashes of what transpires between the lovers: a clenched fist, a birthmark below Mavala's breast. Their conversations are what Orner wants to share, and words fail them. They cannot bridge the divide.

The New York Times Book Review

To complete your tour, end with someone neither Zimbabwean, nor writing of Zimbabwe, but with a novel set in Namibia by an American, Peter Orner. I only include "The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo" (2006) as required reading because it is a book of such enviable brilliance that it is, I think, the standard by which all writing of this southern African region should be set.

Alexandra Fuller, Salon.com

This book has the same sort of episodic structure, lyrical prose and completely hypnotic effect as the novels of Michael Ondaatje. It's a gorgeously written book, very funny, and bursting with soul.

Dave Eggers, The Guardian UK

Not much has been written about Namibia by serious Western writers, but when they turn to it they write rather splendidly on the subject. Take Thomas Pynchon's novel "V," published in 1963, with its breathtaking set-piece about the early 20th Century German colonial war against the native Hereros. Welsh ex-patriate Jon Manchip White produced a fine non-fiction book a few years after that, "The Land God Made in Anger," and decades later his friend (and mine) Nicholas Delbanco published in the quarterly Salmagundi "Letter From Namibia," a long, dramatic essay about his stay on a farm in the outback of the land God made in anger.

Now all of a sudden here's a quirky, lyrical, comical, full- blown novel set in the early 1990s in the former German South-West Africa, or Namibia, the land God made--if we take novelist Peter Orner's temperature correctly--without much of anything useful except a surfeit of stiff upper lip. It's a story about a love affair between an American volunteer teaching at a church school in this drought-stricken nation and one of his colleagues, a Namibian woman, mother of a young boy, who is a veteran of the guerrilla war against the South African Defense Force. And I should say this book is not just a novel, but an art novel in which a gifted short-story writer gives us his first book-length work of fiction, and does so with flair and panache.

Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune

The sweeping power of storytelling lies at the heart of this transcendent debut, an insightful and revelatory novel told with authority, historical practicality and a palpable sense of wonder.

Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald

Esther Stories
These are stories of unusual delicacy and beauty, and this is a remarkable collection.

Charles Baxter

A spirit of passionate tenderness broods over these stories. It is as if love, transcending itself, has become a wisdom so perfect it must cherish everything--grace, of course, and awkwardness too, and innocence, and guilt, and haplessness. And yes, clear-sighted and unhonored loss.

- Marilynne Robinson

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Orner doesn't simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls...Brooding, mysterious, ineffable, beautiful.

- Margot Livesey, The New York Times

THE WASHINGTON POST

There's startling intimacy in every story of Peter Orner's debut collection, Esther Stories, startling because of the immediacy with which Orner's characters confront us and because of the range of feelings they express and the secrets they reveal. Coming at a time when too many novels and stories by young writers foreground irony and little else, Orner's brave assault on emotional ennui is a welcome change.

- The Washington Post

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

In "Shoe Story," one of the shortest and most dangerous in Peter Orner's shotgun collection, two guys are having burgers and talking about love when the couple upstairs starts fighting. "Then she winged her shoes at him. I know this because Cal and I were sitting there listening, wiping our hands on our pants--Ike's got no napkins--when two white shoes dropped into the street like tiny planes crash-landing....They lay sprawled on the pavement, toe to toe, linked in the agony of the fall." You can see why the stories might be dangerous. They are sharp and frequently without mercy. Lives often boil down to a pile of clothes or worse,explode in the sudden violence of long-repressed pain. "Thumbs" is a good example of the kinds of pain that can lead a high school boy to kill a teacher. The stories build on each other, as if the characters from one story could hear the characters from another yelling through the thin walls of an apartment complex.

The Los Angeles Times, Susan Salter Reynolds

Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives
An oral history collection of real life stories by undocumented people who have come to the US from across the globe. See voiceofwitness.org and May issue of Believer Magazine for more information.

Magazines and Anthologies
Anthologies:

Orner's work has appeared in the following anthologies:

Best American Stories 2001 (Edited by Barbara Kingslover)

Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction From the Edge (Harper Collins, (2003)

Pushcart Prize Annual Anthology (Pushcart Press, 2002) and (2007)

The Future Dictionary of America (McSweeney's Books, 2004)

Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories (Norton, 2006)

New Sudden Fiction: Short Stories from America and Beyond (Norton, 2007)

How Do You Spell Chanukah: 18 Writers Celebrate 8 Nights of Lights (Algonquin Books, 2007)

Sex For America: Politically Inspired Erotica, edited by Stephen Elliott (Harper Collins, 2007)