Lorrie Moore

'America's first lady of darkness and mirth.' Guardian'The best American writer of her generation.' Nick Hornby 'Unmissable.' Marie ClaireFrom one of the most celebrated imaginations in American literature, Lorrie Moore's new novel is a magic box of longing and surprise. High up in a New York City hospice, Finn sits with his beloved brother Max, who is slipping from one world into the next. But when a phone call summons Finn back to a troubled old flame, a strange journey begins, opening a trapdoor in reality. It will prompt a questioning of life and death, grief and the past, comedy and tragedy, and the diaphanous separations that lie between them all.'Moore writes with such panache, such extraordinary perception and wit, that not a single sentence is wasted.' Elizabeth Day 'One of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation.' New York Times 'That Moore publishes so rarely is a gift in itself, because it compels you to read her over and over. . . Moore's a writer you don't quit.' Guardian'One of the funniest writers alive.' Dave Eggers

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER Lorrie Moore's first novel since A Gate at the Stairs--a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart. "The prose of I Am Homeless If This is Not My home] might be her finest." --Claire Messud, Harper's "An exquisite exploration of grief, longing, and our relationship with the past . . . mixing comedy with tragedy, and exploring what it means to be alive." --Kristyn Kusek Lewis, Real Simple From "one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation" (Caryn James; The New York Times)--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. 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 towards life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, 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. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes us through a trap door, into a windswept, imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore. "Moore's exhilarating dialogue is acrobatic, her descriptions ravishing." --Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review) " Moore] manages the impossible in her writing: every other sentence is a gut-punch or the funniest line you've ever read, and it coheres into some of the truest writing about life--for what is life if not constantly either hilarious or devastating, and often both? " --LitHub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2023"

Roman - finalist literaturnykh premij PEN/Faulkner Award i Orange Prize for Fiction. 2001 god, Amerika pytaetsja prijti v sebja posle tragedii 11 sentjabrja. Dvadtsatiletnjaja Tessi Keltin, doch fermera iz glubinki, postupaet v prestizhnyj universitet, gde ee zhdut kulturnyj shok i neravnaja bitva s Choserom i Simonoj de Bovuar. Radi podrabotki ona ustraivaetsja njanej v semju, kotoraja kazhetsja ej nezaurjadnoj i budorazhasche tainstvennoj. Chem bolshe Tessi vovlekaetsja v dramy etikh ljudej, tem silnee otdaljaetsja ot svoikh starejuschikh roditelej i mladshego brata, odinokogo i rasterjannogo podrostka, podumyvajuschego posle shkoly pojti dobrovoltsem v armiju. "Zapertaja lestnitsa" - mrachnyj, pronzitelnyj roman Lorri Mur o zhestokostjakh vzroslenija, jade litsemerija i raspolzajuschemsja po shvam obschestve, okhvachennom paranojej, apatiej i otchajannym poiskom smysla povsednevnoj zhizni v teni bolshoj katastrofy. Luchshij amerikanskij pisatel svoego pokolenija. - Nik Khornbi Amerikanskaja pervaja ledi mraka i komedii. - Guardian Lorri Mur - po-nastojaschemu bolshaja pisatelnitsa, i v ee prostykh, s vidu zaurjadnykh slepkakh s zhiznej poterjavshikhsja v sebe ljudej, net nikakogo vysokomerija, zato est to, chto tsenitsja sejchas na ves zolota, - zhalost, sostradanie i ljubov. - Anastasija Zavozova

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.

From one of the most celebrated imaginations in American literature, Lorrie Moore's new novel is a magic box of longing and surprise.

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER - A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ - From "one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation" (The New York Times)--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 Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, NPR, Vulture, Lit Hub "Who else but Lorrie Moore could make, in razor-sharp irresistible prose, a ghost story about death buoyant with life?" --PEOPLE "Is it an allegory? Is it real? It doesn't matter... It's] a novel with big questions, no answers, and it's absolutely brilliant." --Lit Hub " A] triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination." --The Guardian Lorrie Moore's first novel since A Gate at the Stairs--a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart 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... 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 towards life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, 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. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes us through a trap door, into a windswept, imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.

These humorous and poignant tales of lovers, loneliness, and never-quite-belonging, delivered in her characteristically knowing, wry voice, confirm Lorrie Moore as a master of the short story form. Self-Help, Like Life, Birds of America and Bark, her four acclaimed collections, are all here, and for good measure so too are a handful of stories excerpted from the novels Anagrams, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and The Gate at the Stairs. But at the author's request, the order of play is gloriously random: 'I didn't want this Everyman's volume to be one that simply glued all the books together in the obvious sequential order,' she writes. 'I wanted instead to let the magical alphabet set individual stories side by side in an otherwise unexpected and unchronological way so that friction or frost might occur: they could jostle and rap and spark or repel .... It might all be like a playlist set to shuffle ...' So, a joyous new discovery for first-time readers and for Moore fans, a multitude of new angles from which to view her incomparable ouevre.

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.

In this moving, poignant novel by the bestselling author of Birds of America, we share a grown woman's bittersweet nostalgia for the wildness of her youth. 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.

In Like Life's eight exquisite stories, Lorrie Moore's characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can't 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. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships. One prefers to speak on the phone rather than face his friends, another lets the answering machine do all the talking. But whether rejected, afraid to commit, bored, disillusioned, or just misunderstood, even the most hard-bitten are not without some abiding trust in love.

In her bestselling story collection, Birds of America ( it] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability -James McManus, front page of the New York Times Book Review), Lorrie Moore wrote about the disconnect between men and women, about the precariousness of women on the edge, and about loneliness and loss. Now, in her dazzling new novel-her first in more than a decade-Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love. As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer-his Keltjin potatoes are justifiably famous-has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny. The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own. As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed. This long-awaited new novel by one of the most heralded writers of the past two decades is lyrical, funny, moving, and devastating; Lorrie Moore's most ambitious book to date-textured, beguiling, and wise.

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. 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. Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.

Award-winning author Lorrie Moore has been writing criticism for over thirty years - and her forensically intelligent, witty and engaging essays are collected here for the first time. Whether writing on Titanic, Margaret Atwood or The Wire, her pieces always offer surprising insights into contemporary culture.'Exhilarating . . . I was struck not only by Moore's intelligence and wit, and by the syntactical and verbal satisfactions of her prose, but by the fundamental generosity of her critical spirit.' Guardian'One of America's most brilliant writers . . . This book is a delight.' Stylist'Intimate and approachable . . . See What Can Be Done flooded my veins with pleasure.' New York Times'An incisive, wide-ranging and enjoyable collection . . . Marvellously nuanced.' Observer'Impressive . . . so witty and well-mannered . . . Has something wise or funny on almost every page.' Financial Times'The entire book is filled with the sharp, off-the-wall, completely brilliant observations that Moore is famous for.' The Pool

A revelatory tale of love gained and lost, from a master of contemporary American fictionGerard 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.

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 in between: Moore on the writing of fiction (the works 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 (Anais Nin, Marilyn Monroe, John Cheever, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eudora Welty, Bernard Malamud, among others); 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).

Witness the ever-changing history and identity of America in this collection of 40 stories collected from the first 100 years of this bestselling series. For the centennial celebration of this beloved annual series, master of the form Lorrie Moore selects forty stories from the more than two thousand that were published in previous editions. Series editor Heidi Pitlor recounts behind-the-scenes anecdotes and examines, decade by decade, the trends captured over a hundred years. Together, the stories and commentary offer an extraordinary guided tour through a century of literature with what Moore calls "all its wildnesses of character and voice." These forty stories represent their eras but also stand the test of time. Here is Ernest Hemingway's first published story and a classic by William Faulkner, who admitted in his biographical note that he began to write "as an aid to love-making." Nancy Hale's story describes far-reaching echoes of the Holocaust; Tillie Olsen's story expresses the desperation of a single mother; James Baldwin depicts the bonds of brotherhood and music. Here is Raymond Carver's "minimalism," a term he disliked, and Grace Paley's "secular Yiddishkeit." Here are the varied styles of Donald Barthelme, Charles Baxter, and Jamaica Kincaid. From Junot D az to Mary Gaitskill, from ZZ Packer to Sherman Alexie, these writers and stories explore the different things it means to be American.

'Lorrie Moore is one of my very favourite writers.' Monica Heisey 'America's first lady of darkness and mirth.' Guardian 'I'd rather spend time with her than anyone else on Earth.' Nicole FlatteryComplicated, awkward, funny, cruel, heartbroken, mysterious; Self-Help forms an idiosyncratic guide to female existence which is just as relevant today as it was 30 years ago. These stories are modern America at its most real, with characters sharing thoughts and experiences they could have borrowed from our own lives. This is how to deal with divorce, adultery, cancer, how to talk to your mother or become a writer, the Lorrie Moore way.

Shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story AwardIn 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.

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 PostHere 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....