You celebrated Peter Orner’s Love and Shame and Love with us last fall, when it first landed, and now it’s time to celebrate its paperback release – because this is “a powerful and heartfelt family history, one that seems characterized as much by loss and longing as it is by shame and the double dose of love suggested by the book's title” (Chicago Tribune), by “an essential American writer” (Kevin Brockmeier), because Yiyun Li wrote, “Auden said that art is born of humiliation, which seems an ideal place to start appreciating Love and Shame and Love. A keen-eyed observer of American life and history, Peter Orner strips every layer of pretense from his characters, not to diminish but rather to reveal them. This is a real and memorable America”, because Orner wrote this short and powerful snapshot of missing Victor Martinez, and because Ed Asner stars in the book’s trailer.

If you, unfortunately, missed Love and Shame and Love in its original incarnation, wait no longer – join us for a revisit of the Poppers and the writer who tells their tale.

Peter Orner is the 2002-2003 winner of the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection, Esther Stories, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award, and winner of the Samuel Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction. Orner holds both an MFA from the University of Iowa and a degree in law. His work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology and has appeared in a number of national publications, including The Atlantic Monthly and The Paris Review. Orner currently lives in and teaches at San Francisco State University.

Michelle Richmond is the author of the award-winning story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, the novels Dream of the Blue Room and No One You Know, and the New York Times and international bestseller The Year of Fog. We’re looking forward to her new novel in 2013!