for excellence in book reviewing, the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism, and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. Seaman has written for the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She has been a writer-in-residence for Columbia College Chicago and has taught at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Seaman created the anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness, her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists.
Seaman's latest book is River of Books: A Life in Reading.
At Lit Hub she tagged seven books in which "writers ardently and incisively attest to how books save and sustain them, elucidating our profound need for books and affirming the need for us to defend our right to read and write freely." One title on the list:
Peter Orner, Still No Word from You: Notes in the MarginsRead about another entry on the list.
Orner is a virtuoso of subtlety, nuance, and essence. He approaches moments, memories, and the emotions they arouse at a slant, almost surreptitiously, his tone wistful, pensive. He is also edgy and witty and sometimes furious. In both his fiction, including the ravishing short-story collection Maggie Brown & Others, and his essays, Orner mulls over his experiences growing up Jewish inChicago and its North Shore suburbs, a milieu rife with struggle, longing, anger, secrets, lies, and love. Books are his refuge, as he asserts in Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live (2016) and, somewhat more covertly, Still No Word from You.
Like Garner’s reading memoir, Orner’s is loosely structured as a day in the life of a writer, but instead of pegging it to meals, he marks time, from “Morning” to “Mid-Morning,” “Noon,”“3 P.M.,” “Dusk,” and “Night.” That said, this is actually an account of a day in the mind of a writer. Musings and recollected scenes from his past morph into thoughts, for example, about a poem by Amy Clampitt, finding his mother’s penciled “Yes!” in the margin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, and piquant reflections on Jean Rhys, her fiction, and her “merciless concision.” Orner practices merciful distillation, infusing every word with regret, sorrow, or wonder. Absurd and poignant family stories alternate with tales about such writers as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, the underappreciated Wright Morris and Maeve Brennan, Lorraine Hansberry, Bette Howland, Paul Celan, and Andre Dubus. The result is an intimate, melancholy, frank, and surprising paean to reading and books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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