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

Finn is in the grip of middle-age and on an enforced break from work: it might be that he's too emotional to teach history now. He is living in an America hurtling headlong into hysteria, after all.

High up in a New York City hospice, he 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.

'America's first lady of darkness and mirth' Guardian 'How lucky we are that we have Lorrie Moore's voice to reflect this lunatic world back to us and show us how to see it in all its devastating hilarity.' Lauren Groff From 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.

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.

A startlingly perceptive series of portraits of the young, the hip, the lost, the unsettled and the unhinged of modern-day America, from the supremely talented Lorrie Moore. 'Her stories, her stories, are perfect.' Slate 'Irresistible.' New York Times Book Review 'Such a delight.' Sunday Telegraph 'One of America's most brilliant writers.' Stylist Lorrie Moore's dazzling collection of stories is remarkable for its range, emotional force and dark humour, and for the sheer beauty and power of its language. It unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the young, the hip, the lost, the unsettled and the unhinged of modern-day America. In what may be her most stunning book yet, Lorrie Moore explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane with all of the wit, brio and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time.

'One of the funniest writers alive.' Dave Eggers 'Her stories, her stories, are perfect.' Slate 'Such a delight.' Sunday Telegraph 'Poetic, sharp and devastatingly funny.' Guardian A wonderful collection from one of the most acclaimed and influential writers of her generation. Since the publication of Self-Help, her first collection of stories, Lorrie Moore has been hailed as one of the greatest and most influential voices in American fiction. Her ferociously funny, soulful stories tell of the gulf between men and women, the loneliness of the broken-hearted and the yearned-for, impossible intimacies we crave. Gathered here for the first time in a beautiful hardback edition is the complete stories along with three new and previously unpublished in book form: Paper Losses, The Juniper Tree, Debarking.

Complicated, 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.

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 nothing: 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.

'The best American writer of her generation.' Nick Hornby 'The nearest thing we have to Chekhov.' Alison Lurie 'Her stories, her stories, are perfect.' Slate 'Lorrie Moore . . . is one of my absolute heroes' Sinead Gleeson This absorbing, ironic, bitter-sweet collection of nine stories marked Lorrie Moore's talented debut. Sharp, cruel and funny, the stories are presented as a highly idiosyncratic guide to female existence: 'How to be an Other Woman', 'How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)', 'How to Become a Writer', 'The Kid's Guide to Divorce'.

'She writes with such panache, such extraordinary perception and wit.' Elizabeth Day 'A forensically brave writer, with a semantic virtuosity rarely equalled.' Telegraph 'Unmissable.' Marie Claire 'Hilarious and distressing, entertaining and wise.' Roddy Doyle A brilliantly funny and sharply observant novel from one of the most acclaimed American writers of her generation. This novel follows the lives of two 11-year-olds intent on escaping childhood. As the strength of their friendship is tested repeatedly, they begin to take their first, exhilarating steps towards adulthood.

'You can sit back and have the time of your life reading A Gate at the Stairs.' Observer 'One of the funniest writers alive' Dave Eggers 'Hilarious and distressing, entertaining and wise' Roddy Doyle 'Moore's a writer you don't quit.' Guardian ***SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION*** A startlingly funny, inventive novel from one of America's most brilliant writers. With America quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a 'half-Jewish' farmer's daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to university - escaping her provincial home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics. When she takes a job as a part-time nanny to a couple who seem at once mysterious and glamorous, Tassie is drawn into the life of their newly-adopted child and increasingly complicated household. As her past becomes increasingly alien to her - her parents seem older when she visits; her disillusioned brother ever more fixed on joining the military - Tassie finds herself becoming a stranger to herself. As the year unfolds, love leads her to new and formative experiences - but it is then that the past and the future burst forth in dramatic and shocking ways. Refracted through the eyes of this memorable narrator, A Gate at the Stairs is a lyrical, beguiling and wise novel of our times.

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award
Finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction
Chosen as a Best Book of the Year by "The New York Times Book Review," "The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, Kansas City Star, Financial Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "and "Real Simple "
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.

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.

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.

A "New York Times" Book of the Year
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
Winner of the "Salon "Book Award
A "Village Voice "Book of the Year
Birds of America" "is the celebrated collection of twelve stories from Lorrie Moore, one of the finest authors at work today.
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"Fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial.... Stand[s] by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability." --"The New York Times Book Review "
"A marvelous collection.... Her stories are tough, lean, funny, and metaphysical.... Birds of America has about it a wild beauty that simply makes one feel more connected to life." --"The Boston Globe"
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"At once sad, funny, lyrical and prickly, Birds of America attests to the deepening emotional chiaroscuro of her wise and beguiling work." --"The New York Times"
"Stunning.... There's really no one like Moore; in a perfect marriage of art form and mind, she has made the short story her own." --"Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "
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"Birds of America stands as a major work of American short fiction.... Absolutely mastered." --"Elle "
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"Wonderful.... These stories impart such terrifying truths." --"Philadelphia Inquirer "
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"Lorrie Moore soars with Birds of America.... A marvelous, fiercely funny book." --"Newsweek"
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"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"

The publication of "Self-Help" introduced readers to Lorrie Moore's refined blend of humor and insight, and made her one of the best-loved writers of her generation. These stories, told in a voice that is at once witty, melancholy, and bravely honest, paint a tableau of lovers and family, of loss and pleasure, desire and memory. From the young secretary who by day hopes someone will notice her Phi Beta Kappa key and by night makes love to a married man she met at a Florsheim shoe store, to the shattering of a marriage by the shores of a tranquil lake, "Self-Help" is a unique, enduring work of short fiction.

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.

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.
Lorrie Moore brings her keen eye for wit and surprise to the volume, and The Best American Short Stories 2004 is an eclectic and enthralling gathering of well-known voices and talented up-and-comers. Here are stories that probe the biggest issues: ambition, gender, romance, war. Here are funny and touching and striking tales of a Spokane Indian, the estranged wife of an Iranian immigrant, an American tutor in Bombay. In her introduction Lorrie Moore writes, "The stories collected here impressed me with their depth of knowledge and feeling of character, setting, and situation . . . They spoke with amused intelligence, compassion, and dispassion."