In Short with Susan Minot and Peter Orner

Peter Orner’s Molly Brown and other Stories provides many short takes—on a first date that turns into a late-night road trip to a séance in an abandoned airplane hangar, or a family’s memories of the painful mystery surrounding a neglected uncle’s demise and 42 others. Orner reveals how our fleeting decisions between kindness and abandonment chase us across time. In Susan Minot’s Why I Don’t Write, a writer dryly catalogs the myriad reasons she cannot write; an artist bicycles through protests in lower Manhattan and ruminates on an elusive lover; an old woman on her deathbed calls out for a man other than her husband; a hapless fifteen-year-old boy finds himself in sexual peril; two young people in the 1990s fall helplessly in love, then bicker just as helplessly, tortured by jealousy and mistrust.