That Orner manages to swing between his Kafka theories and his own visit to Harbin Hot Springs (he never mentions it by name, but anyone who's been to the famously naked and watery New Age destination, burned to the ground in 2015, knows what Orner is talking about) is quite brilliant. The author of The Trial may have craved solitude, but in reality, Orner writes, 'we're talking about a guy who was out at the Cafe Louvre yukking it up with Max Brod and his other law school buddies all of the time.'

In fact, Orner has an 'utterly unprovable theory' based on bits of Kafka's diary which posits that, as much as Kafka wanted to be glum and lonely, the man wasn't actually anything of the sort. One of my favorites - though I must say, I adored every essay in this immensely thoughtful and intimate book - is 'Stray Thoughts on Kafka.' On the surface, Orner has written a study of Kafka's own struggle with loneliness. These are Orner's own kitchen table stories. I can't think of a more fitting description for the feeling that washes across the entirety of Orner's latest book, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live, a collection of essays, both short and long, about books, death, parenting, children, fathers, loneliness, mothers, and everything else that goes along with being alive. 'If I could get away with trying to write such stories for the rest of my life,' Orner, who lives in San Francisco and Bolinas, continues, 'I would, because I believe in kitchen table silence.' Midway through his essay about ' The Old System' by Saul Bellow, Peter Orner mentions the 'kitchen table story.' This is Orner's 'preferred species of story,' he writes, 'where a single, motionless narrator looks out a kitchen window and ponders.'

Am I Alone Here? by Peter Orner