BIRDS OF AMERICA
From the opening story, “Willing”—about a second-rate movie actress in her thirties who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home—Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. And in “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens,” a woman who goes through the stages of grief as she mourns the death of her cat is seen by her friends as really mourning other issues: the son she never had, the impending death of her parents, Bosnia. In what may be her most stunning book yet, Lorrie Moore explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time.
Fiction/Short Stories
ANAGRAMS
Gerard sits, fully clothed, in his empty bathtub and pines for Benna. Neighbors in the same apartment building, they share a wall and Gerard listens for the sound of her toilet flushing. Gerard loves Benna. And then Benna loves Gerard. She listens to him play piano, she teaches poetry and sings at nightclubs. As this relationship ebbs and flows, through reality and imagination, Lorrie Moore paints a captivating, innovative portrait of men and women in love and not in love. The first novel from a master of contemporary American fiction, Anagrams is a revelatory tale of love gained and lost.
Fiction
BARK
These eight masterly stories reveal Lorrie Moore at her most mature and in a perfect configuration of craft, mind, and bewitched spirit, as she explores the passage of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and hilarious pitfalls to reveal her own exquisite, singular wisdom. Here are people beset, burdened, buoyed; protected by raising teenage children; dating after divorce; facing the serious illness of a longtime friend; setting forth on a romantic assignation abroad, having it interrupted mid-trip, and coming to understand the larger ramifications and the impossibility of the connection; stories that show people coping with large dislocation in their lives, with risking a new path to answer the desire to be in relation to someone.
Fiction/Short Stories
A GATE AT THE STAIRS
Twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the daughter of a gentleman farmer, has come to a university town as a student. When she takes a job as a part-time nanny for a mysterious and glamorous family, she finds herself drawn deeper into their world and forever changed. Told through the eyes of this memorable narrator, A Gate at the Stairs is a piercing novel of race, class, love, and war in America.
Fiction
LIKE LIFE
The men and women in Like Life’s eight exquisite stories cannot quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Whether rejected, afraid to commit, bored, disillusioned, or just misunderstood, even the most hard-bitten are not without some abiding trust in love. These characters reveal the wide range of humor and compassion that are hallmarks of Lorrie Moore’s reputation as a master of contemporary American fiction.
Fiction/Short Stories
SELF-HELP
In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.
Fiction/Short Stories
WHO WILL RUN THE FROG HOSPITAL?
The summer Berie was fifteen, she and her best friend Sils had jobs at Storyland in upstate New York where Berie sold tickets to see the beautiful Sils portray Cinderella in a strapless evening gown. They spent their breaks smoking, joking, and gossiping. After work they followed their own reckless rules. But no matter how wild, they always managed to escape any real danger—until the adoring Berie sees that Sils really does need her help—and then everything changes.
Fiction
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
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