Welcome to Litsy!

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 Stationed in the South Pacific during World War II, Seymour Orner wrote a letter every day to his wife, Lorraine. She seldom responded, leading him to plead in 1945, �Another day and still no word from you.� Seventy years later, Peter Orner writes in response to his grandfather�s plea: �Maybe we read because we seek that word from someone, from anyone.� 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.