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.

'She writes with such panache, such extraordinary perception and wit, that not a single sentence is wasted.' Elizabeth Day'A forensically brave writer, acutely attuned to life's randomness, with a semantic virtuosity rarely equalled.' Telegraph'A fiction writer with as fine a bead on contemporary life and relationships and absurdity as anyone writing today. . . . Startling, painful, funny.' Elle

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 p...

"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).A literary event—a new collection of stories by one of America's most beloved and admired short story writers, her first collection in fifteen years.In these eight masterful stories, Lorrie Moore, in a perfect blend of craft and bewitched spirit, explores the passage of time and sum...

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 f...

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 d...

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 hea...

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: Pape...

The celebrated collection of twelve stories from one of the finest authors at work todayFrom 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...

'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...

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 dec...

'America's first lady of darkness and mirth.' Guardian'I'd rather spend time with her than anyone else on Earth.' Nicole Flattery'Lorrie Moore is one of my very favourite writers.' Monica HeiseyComplicated, 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 Ameri...