Peter Orner

They found my mother’s first cousin frozen in a rented cabin up in New Hampshire, not far from where he’d gone to prep school. A smart kid, Bernard enrolled at Harvard on a math scholarship in the fall of 1973.

The authors ponder the implication of immersing fiction in place—Chicago in the case of Orner’s new novel Love and Shame and Love—and non-place, as in the hypertext that accompanies La Farge’s new novel, Luminous Airplanes.

In the first installment in BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America series, Peter Orner reads his short story “Herb and Rosalie Swanson at the Cocoanut Grove,” published in BOMB 103’s literary supplement, First Proof.

Two decades after it happened Herb Swanson began to tell it at dinner parties. 

In the plum, thickly carpeted, overly waitered dining room of the Standard Club of Chicago, my grandfather and my father are finishing lunch.