Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin

Peter Orner

Oct 2022 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Chris Abernathy

About this audiobook

A new collection of pieces on literature and life by the author of Am I Alone Here?, a finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism From the acclaimed fiction writer about whom Dwight Garner of the New York Times wrote, "You know from the second you pick him up that he's the real deal," comes Still No Word from You, a unique chain of essays and intimate stories that meld the lived life and the reading life. For Orner, there is no separation. Covering such well-known writers as Lorraine Hansberry, Primo Levi, and Marilynne Robinson, as well as other greats like Maeve Brennan and James Alan McPherson, Orner's highly personal take on literature alternates with his own true stories of loss and love, hope and despair. In his mother's copy of A Coney Island of the Mind, he's stopped short by a single word in the margin, "YES!"-which leads him to conjure his mother at twenty-three. He stops reading Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring three quarters of the way through because he knows that finishing the novel will leave him bereft. Orner's solution is to start again from the beginning to slow the inevitable heartache. Still No Word from You is a book for anyone for whom reading is as essential as breathing.

About the author

Peter Orner is the author of two novels, Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, and two story collections, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge and Esther Stories. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, and Best American Stories.

Chris Abernathy is a lifelong professional storyteller who found his calling telling scary stories to campers around a roaring fire at Camp Sumatanga in Alabama. In 2015 he began narrating audiobooks and now works full-time from his home studio.