Booksmith is thrilled to host longtime favorite Peter Orner for his new book, Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin. He'll be in conversation Daniel Gumbiner, author The Boatbuilder and editor of The Believer magazine. Join us!

PLEASE NOTE: Advance sales for this event have ended, but we will have a few seats available at the door. Questions? Write events@booksmith.com.

Please note:

• Safety: ID and proof of full vaccination, including at least one booster shot, will be required at the door. Masks will be required throughout the duration of the event and capacity will be limited to allow indoor distancing. 
• Because we’re limiting capacity, we can't guarantee we'll have space for walk-ins. Free seats have all been reserved, so the best way to ensure you’ll get a seat is to order the Book + Seat ticket through this link. If we don't sell out in advance, remaining seats will be available for free on a first come, first served basis with no guarantee of admission for walk-ups.
• We are happy to offer *signed copies* of Still No Word from You: order a Book + Seat ticket bundle if you'd like to pick up a signed copy at the event, or order here if you just want a signed copy.
• Order The Boatbuilder by Daniel Gumbiner here.
• If we feel it is not safe to gather, as the event gets closer, we will pivot to a virtual event and your registration will remain valid.
• Questions? Write events@booksmith.com.

About the book

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.

Recent praise:

"Orner is a highly lauded author whose writing, in both fiction and nonfiction, is an act of wizardry. In each of these micro-essays, he reduces the meat of his own life down to the bone, then stirs in fatty excerpts from hundreds of stories, novels and poems by writers ranging from Woolf to Rhys, Babel to Kafka. The resulting brew sometimes scalds, sometimes soothes, but always proves that literature can be a kind of sustenance." -- New York Times Book Review

A San Francisco Chronicle Favorite Book of 2022: "This book is never leaving my possession." -- Kathryn Ma, The San Francisco Chronicle

"Still No Word from You Redefines the Experience of Reading." -- Los Angeles Times 

About the authors

Peter Orner is the author of the novels The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love and the story collections Esther Stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others. His previous collection of essays, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. A three-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Orner’s work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, and has been translated into eight ­languages. He has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, the California Book Award for fiction, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish fiction, as well as a Fulbright in Namibia. He is the director of creative writing at Dartmouth College and lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont. Author photo by Katie Crouch.

Daniel Gumbiner’s first book, The Boatbuilder, was nominated for the National Book Award and a finalist for the California Book Awards. His second novel is forthcoming in fall 2023 from Astra House. He is the Editor ofThe Believer and a 2022-23 Hermitage Fellow. He lives in Oakland, CA. Author photo by Whitney Freedman.

Please note:

• Safety: ID and proof of full vaccination, including at least one booster shot, will be required at the door. Masks will be required throughout the duration of the event and capacity will be limited to allow indoor distancing. 
• Because we’re limiting capacity, we can't guarantee we'll have space for walk-ins. Free seats have all been reserved, so the best way to ensure you’ll get a seat is to order the Book + Seat ticket through this link. If we don't sell out in advance, remaining seats will be available for free on a first come, first served basis with no guarantee of admission for walk-ups.
• We are happy to offer *signed copies* of Still No Word from You: order a Book + Seat ticket bundle if you'd like to pick up a signed copy at the event, or order here if you just want a signed copy.
• Order The Boatbuilder by Daniel Gumbiner here.
• If we feel it is not safe to gather, as the event gets closer, we will pivot to a virtual event and your registration will remain valid.
• Questions? Write events@booksmith.com.
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