Lorrie Moore is an acclaimed American author renowned for her incisive exploration of modern life, particularly the quest for love and companionship. Her short stories masterfully capture the often absurd indignities of ordinary life with unwavering intelligence, a near-miraculous wit, and remarkable depth of feeling. Moore writes with a supple yet sharp prose, her style simultaneously hilarious and heartrending, forging an unmistakable authorial voice. Her mature works exude a generous, pellucid quality, showcasing a writer who has mastered her art and delivers pure pleasure to her readers.
He is living in an America hurtling headlong into hysteria, after all. High up in a New York hospice, he sits with his beloved brother Max as he slips from one world into the next. A call from Illinois summons him back to his troubled old flame Lily, the great love of his life.
"A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all...this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings as it questions the stories we have been told which may or may not be true."--Publisher marketing.
Adrienne is living in a puritanical age, when the best compliment a childless woman can get is: 'You'd make a terrific mother'. That's when she goes to her friends' Labor Day picnic and accidentally kills their baby. The shock of this scene is expertly packed into two brief paragraphs. What follows is Adrienne's retreat from life and her attempt to return to it. Her sharp scepticism about the people around her is achingly funny. Yet beyond derision there is forgiveness and something along the lines of love.
When in 1999 I began writing for The New York Review of Books ... my stance became that of the ingenuous Martian who had just landed on a gorgeous alien planet ... Montaigne's que sais-je . A little light, a little wonder, some skepticism, some awe, some squinting, some je ne sais quoi . Pick a thing up, study it, shake it, skip it across a still surface to see how much felt and lively life got baked into it. Does it sail? Observe. See what can be done. Lorrie Moore has been writing criticism for over thirty years, and her forensically intelligent, witty, and engaging essays are collected together here for the first time. Whether writing on Titanic , Margaret Atwood, or The Wire , her pieces always offer elegant and surprising insights into multiple forms of art. Crucially, Moore is a practitioner who writes criticism; her discussion of other people's work is based on her understanding of what it really takes to make something out of of what it takes to make art. This lends her encounters with books, films, and paintings the uniquely intimate quality which has made them so immensely popular with readers. In sparkling, articulate prose - studded with frequently hilarious insights - Moore's meditations are a rare opportunity to witness a brilliant mind thinking things through and figuring things out on the page.
Taken from award-winning writer Lorrie Moore's debut short story collection Self-Help (1985), How To Become a Writer is a wryly witty deconstruction of tips for aspiring writers, told in vignettes by a self-absorbed narrator who fails to observe the wrold around her.
Shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award In these eight masterful stories, Lorrie Moore explores the passing of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and comic pitfalls. Gimlet-eyed social observation, the public and private absurdities of American life, irony and half-cracked love wend their way through these stories, in which Moore is always tender, never sentimental and often heartbreakingly funny.
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.
Collects forty short stories published between 1915 and 2015, from writers that include Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and Alice Munro that exemplify their era and stand the test of time --
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A collection of stories by one of America’s most beloved and admired short-story writers that explores the passage of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and hilarious pitfalls to reveal an exquisite, singular wisdom. • “Uncanny.... Moving.... A powerful collection.” —The Washington Post 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….
In this brilliant collection of stories Lorrie Moore addresses herself to a contemporary emotional dilemma - the widening gulf between men and women, and the simultaneous yearning for and fear of closeness.
