Prairie Lights Books invites you to hear bestselling author Peter Orner as he reads from his newest novel, The Gossip Columnist's Daughter, while joined in conversation by Kevin Brockmeier.
Narrated by a character named Jed Rosenthal, a struggling writer who hasn't published a book in over a decade and whose wife separated from him and took full custody of their child, The Gossip Columnist's Daughter traces Jed's meticulous search for answers to a cold case murder of a young woman who was the daughter of his grandparents' former close friends – a project that, in Jed's situation, quickly turns into an obsession.
Andres Dubus III, bestselling author of The House of Sand and Fog, praises The Gossip Columnist's Daughter as "Masterfully written, funny, often achingly moving" and adds, "If there is a more daring and original narrative voice in contemporary American fiction than Peter Orner’s, then I don’t know whose it is.”
Peter Orner is the author of seven acclaimed books including Maggie Brown & Others, Love and Shame and Love, Esther Stories, finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Am I Alone Here?, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, The Believer, Best American Stories, and been awarded four Pushcart Prizes. A Guggenheim fellow and recipient of the Rome Prize, Orner is chair of the English and Creative Writing Department at Dartmouth College. Born in Chicago, he lives with his family in Vermont, where he’s also a volunteer firefighter.
Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky, The View from the Seventh Layer, and The Ghost Variations; the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and a memoir of his seventh-grade year called A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. He teaches frequently at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised. You can find him online at kevinbrockmeier.com.