Our June Author of the Month: LORRIE MOORE
Wednesday, May 31, 2023 at 5:23pm
Lorrie Moore is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The publication of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a literary event—a major new novel by one of North America’s most admired writers—her first in more than a decade. A daring novel about love and death and what lies between; a ghost story set in the 19th and 21st centuries; an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic) and the vanishing and persistence of all things—seen and unseen.A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the 19th century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin both presumed dead but perhaps not dead at all… A meditation on what it means to be haunted by the past. To what extent—both in our national history and in the heart—does life persist on into death and vice versa?
With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Moore deftly reveals how, even in death, it’s life that reverberates. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers, siblings and the stories we have all been told, which may or may not be true but that take us on a windswept, imagined journey into the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the Lorrie Moore Zone.
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I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
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Hardcover
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"Get ready to expand your sense of what Lorrie Moore--and a novel--can do." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post, on A Gate at the Stairs
From "one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation" (Caryn James, The New York Times)-- a daring novel, her first in more than a decade, about love and death and what lies between and after. A ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things--seen and unseen.
A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boardinghouse. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all . . .
With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull toward life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings, and of the stories we have been told, which take us through a trapdoor on an imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.
Anagrams
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A revelatory tale of love gained and lost--from a master of contemporary American fiction. o "An extraordinary, often hilarious novel." --The New York Times Book Review
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 their relationships ebbs and flows, through reality and imagination, Lorrie Moore paints a captivating, innovative portrait of men and women in love and not in love.
Bark
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"The glory of Moore's writing isn't simply that it toys with our expectations; it is that--like life itself--it turns them on their heads and gives them a good hard shake. . . . A long time in coming, Bark is a reminder--if one was needed--that when it comes to writing stories, Moore is still ahead of the pack." --Toronto Star
In these eight masterful stories, Lorrie Moore, in a perfect blend of craft and bewitched spirit, explores the passage of time, and summons up its inevitable sorrows and hilarious pitfalls to reveal her own exquisite, singular wisdom.
In "Debarking," a newly divorced man tries to keep his wits about him as the United States prepares to invade Iraq, and against this ominous moment, we see--in all its irresistible hilarity and darkness--the perils of divorce and what can follow in its wake. . . . In "Foes," a political argument goes grotesquely awry as the events of 9/11 unexpectedly manifest at a fund-raising dinner in Georgetown. . . . In "The Juniper Tree," a teacher, visited by the ghost of her recently deceased friend, is forced to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in a kind of nightmare reunion. . . . And in "Wings," we watch the unraveling of two once-hopeful musicians who neither held fast to their dreams nor struck out along other paths as Moore deftly depicts the intricacies of dead ends and the workings of regret.
Gimlet-eyed social observation, the public and private absurdities of life, dramatic irony, and enduring half-cracked love wend their way through each of these narratives in a heartrending mash-up of the tragic and the laugh-out-loud--the hallmark of Lorrie Moore-land.
Birds of America
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER o A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR o From the bestselling author of A Gate at the Stairs: A collection of twelve stories that's "one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability" (The New York Times Book Review).
A volume by one of the most exciting writers at work today, the acclaimed author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Self-Help. Stories remarkable in their range, emotional force, and dark laughter, and in the sheer beauty and power of their language.
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 and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being--Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America.
In the story "Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People" ("There is nothing as complex in the world--no flower or stone--as a single hello from a human being"), a woman newly separated from her husband is on a long-planned trip through Ireland with her mother. When they set out on an expedition to kiss the Blarney Stone, the image of wisdom and success that her mother has always put forth slips away to reveal the panicky woman she really is.
In "Charades," a family game at Christmas is transformed into a hilarious and insightful (and fundamentally upsetting) revelation of crumbling family ties.
In "Community Life,"a shy, almost reclusive, librarian, Transylvania-born and Vermont-bred, moves in with her boyfriend, the local anarchist in a small university town, and all hell breaks loose. 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 (Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Häagen Dazs, Rage) is seen by her friends as really mourning other issues: the impending death of her parents, the son she never had, Bosnia.
Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore
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A beautiful hardcover edition of the collected stories of one of America's most revered and admired authors--originally published in the acclaimed collections Self-Help, Like Life, Birds of America, and Bark and including three additional stories excerpted from her novels.
Moore is one of America's most revered writers, and this career-spanning collection showcases her exceptional talent for leavening tragedy with humor, for blending sorrow with subversive wit. Her keenly observed stories are peopled by a variety of lost souls--husbands, wives, lovers, tourists, professors, students, even a ghost--who are often grappling with pain or disappointment: a divorced man obsessed with self-help books, a washed-up Hollywood actress living in a hotel, a woman with a terminal illness.
But however lovelorn or dislocated the characters--from the wisecracking wedding guest in "Thank You for Having Me" to the self-deluded musicians in "Wings" to the complicated parent-child pairs in "How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)" and "The Kid's Guide to Divorce"--their stories are always grounded in insight and compassion. Moore's portraits of the parents of a seriously ill child in "People Like That Are the Only People Here" and of a woman haunted by guilt over the death of her friend's baby in "Terrific Mother" achieve a notably unsentimental and yet quietly devastating power.
Whether moving or darkly funny, all of these pieces channel the messiness of the human condition through Moore's characteristically knowing, wry voice, and together they confirm her as a master of the short story.
See What Can Be Done
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A welcome surprise: more than fifty prose pieces, gathered together for the first time, by one of America's most revered and admired novelists and short-story writers, whose articles, essays and cultural commentary--appearing in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Harper's Magazine and elsewhere--have been parsing the political, artistic and media idiom for the last three decades.
From Lorrie Moore's earliest reviews of novels by Margaret Atwood and Nora Ephron, to an essay on Ezra Edelman's 2016 O.J. Simpson documentary, and everything in between: this book features Moore on the writing of fiction (the work of V. S. Pritchett, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, Stanley Elkin, Dawn Powell, Nicholson Baker et al.) . . . on the continuing unequal state of race in America . . . on the shock of the shocking GOP . . . on the dangers (and cruel truths) of celebrity marriages and love affairs . . . on the wilds of television (The Wire, Friday Night Lights, Into the Abyss, Girls, Homeland, True Detective, Making a Murderer) . . . on the (d)evolving environment . . . on terrorism, the historical imagination and the world's newest form of novelist . . . on the lesser (and larger) lives of biography and the midwifery between art and life (Anaïs Nin, Marilyn Monroe, John Cheever, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eudora Welty, Bernard Malamud, among others) . . . and on the high art of being Helen Gurley Brown . . . and much, much more.
"Fifty years from now, it may well turn out that the work of very few American writers has as much to say about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore" (Harper's Magazine).
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER o In this moving, poignant novel by the bestselling author of Birds of America--and a master of American fiction--we share a grown woman's bittersweet nostalgia for the wildness of her youth.
"An enchanting novel." --The New York Times
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, teasing the fun out of small town life, sleeping in the family station wagon, and drinking borrowed liquor from old mayonnaise jars. 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.
