In this skillful and varied collection, Peter Orner once again shows us how it's done. "It" in this case being short fiction or brief, exquisite vignettes taken from his own experience. There are short stories here that are rooted firmly in their settings: some in the sleepy, hippie-inflected hills of Northern California, others in Fall River, Massachusetts's Jewish community. There are what I can only assume are semi-autobiographical stories describing how a new marriage breaks down as one of the parties slowly succumbs to mental illness. There's a lovely, perhaps necessarily incomplete homage to Len, a wildly inventive, endlessly energetic summer camp director who is slowly losing his life to a terminal illness he's forced to keep secret from his past associates. There are stories about Peter Orner's lawyer dad that are mostly about how different they were and how much he misses his dad anyway. There are a few stories you might have heard in a dorm room late at night as a college junior. And, as in any short story collection of any length, there are some strays. I can particularly recommend the title story, "Padanaram", "Naked Man Hides", and the aforementioned "Ineffectual Tribute to Len" which may be the real heartbreaker here. But Orner's batting average is so much higher than the average Tin House submission rat's that opinions are bound to vary and most things here work on at least one level.

What holds all of this together is an attention to craft and a deeply held appreciation for the short story form. Orner argues that while novels might tell us more about a character and their lives, their very size closes off their narrative: they purport to tell the definitive story of a person or an event. A short story, on the other hand, is, thanks to its very length and structure, half-built, incomplete, and, therefore, always a bit unfinished. It's eternally open and makes no claims to setting down a definitive account of anything or anyone. It's something to consider, and the stories in this volume make the author's case fairly well. So well that Orner himself seems to have come up in the world considerably since the relative success of "Am I Alone Here?" He's now teaching at Dartmouth and, while I'm not sure of the timeframe here, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright to, of all places, Namibia. Quite frankly, few writers working today deserve it more than he does. Sentence by sentence and story by story, Peter Orner shows that he's the real thing. ( )

His writing is amazing; he says so much with so few words. The characters are so well developed, and this is so much pain in this book. Orner is also excellent at portraying mundane occurrences in very interesting ways. ( )

Rating: 4.5* of five

All the stars, all the stripes, all the band fanfares for Walt Kaplan is Broke: A Novella! The Chicago stuff, Lighted Windows, not so much; the thematic unity there was love, looking for love, running into it without meaning to, and that's pretty much why short stories get a bad rap from most folks because, in the end, who friggin cares.

Renters: A Sequence was affecting as a group of minor stories, cohesive in their central theme of exploring the disaster and misery of a marriage foundering under the skyscraper-tall waves of mental illness; the issue for me, the reason it wasn't as rock-me-back beautiful as Walt Kaplan was, was that the characters were sketched in thin, spidery lines instead of bold, dark strokes.

The Cali stuff, Come Back to California, was okay, I guess, but not excellent the way the Fall River, Mass, Jews in Castaways were. Startlingly rich and layered characterizations in quite compact stories, so compact as to be fleeting in some cases. The best single story in the book is in this section: "Bernard: A Character Study" was a peak read for me, a simple and direct evocation of a simple and direct person's time on this Earth.

The micro-ness of the fictions works best in the novella. They are a perfect meal made of tapas, orchestrated to present a dozen views of the tale; they each have a flavor impact outsized to their physical page presence, but contribute their unique qualities to a whole and satisfying conclusion to one's story hunger:

And think of the '60s, when the whole country got a little wilder and we joined in and did it twice a night? You remember, Sar? Now twice a night would be like rising from the dead, but history is history, and if not set down on paper it should at least be ruminated upon. Sarah and Walt Kaplan, one night, more than once, two entirely separate fornications.

Now, for a philosophical as well as a practical question: Why didn't we just push the beds together and leave them there? Ah, because that would be a lie, no? The nature of the reaching, the nature of the whispered entreaties, a thousand variations on the same invitation, is that both reaching of the hands and the question in question invariably lead to moments of complete incompleteness. Because the upshot of coupling is uncoupling. The essence of association is disassociation. Because you can fuck till you're blue, but at a certain point the inevitable nightly drawing apart happens for good, am I right or am I right? Spell it out again: the retreat once again to separate beds attains a cementation that precludes any further you wannas. After a certain point you wanna? is no longer an invitation for rumpus; it's a cry from oblivion.

It's to your taste, or it isn't; but it *is* beautiful. ( )

What kind of word magician writes a novella in short stories that leaves me in tears when a character dies? These snippets pieced together a life, a community. And I hated to leave.

I had heard a lot of buzz about Peter Orner's Maggie Brown & Others. And it was on my pre-approved NetGalley shelf. I squeezed it into my reading schedule.

The early short stories captivated me. Twice I quoted the book for David Abrams' Sunday Sentence on Twitter, where people post 'the best sentence' they read that week:

An old boyfriend once told her that she had a way of using magnanimity as a weapon.

Shouts in the dark. Maybe that's the best we can do to reach beyond ourselves.

I noted lovely sentences such as, "Her shoulder blades are still shaped like the prows of rowboats." And pointed insights like "There's something so ruthless about optimism."

The diverse stories are insightful and I loved meeting all of these people, learning so much about them through these small slivers of life.

In the fourth section of the book, Walt Kaplan is Broke: A Novella, we meet a good man with a small life, a broke man rich in love. The stories jump through time, building the story of Fall River in New Jersey and the remnant community of Jews--those who have died and "the ones waiting for the opportunity."

You have to love people like Walt and Sarah Kaplan who ask "you wanna" and then push their twin beds together, never having considered purchasing a queen bed.

I could return to these stories again and again.

In one story a writer is told there is no money in writing short stories! I would guess that is true, but I am sure glad writers like Orner still employ the form.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. ( )