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 annual series, The Best American Short Stories, 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 deca...

From the national bestselling author of A Gate at the Stairs—and a master of contemporary American fiction—comes “a funny, cohesive, and moving collection of stories" (The New York Times Book Review).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 joyfu...

"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 StarIn these eight masterful stories, Lorrie Moore, in a perfect blend of craft and bewitched spirit, explores the passage of time, ...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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 TimesThe 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...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • 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...

"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 StairsFrom "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, devotio...

A revelatory tale of love gained and lost—from a master of contemporary American fiction. • "An extraordinary, often hilarious novel." —The New York Times Book ReviewGerard 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 sing...

Lyrical, devastatingly funny, wise, and beguiling, A Gate at the Stairs is Lorrie Moore’s most ambitious book to date.The long-awaited new novel from one of the most heralded writers of the past thirty years, A Gate at the Stairs is a book of stunning power.Set just after the events of September 2001, it is a story about Tassie Keltjin, a twenty-year-old making her way in a new world and coming of age. Tassie is a “smile-less” girl from the plains of the m...

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 Lorr...

From the national bestselling author of Birds of America comes “a brilliant collection” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) of eight exquisite stories of men and women stumbling through their daily existence.In Like Life, Lorrie Moore’s 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 Yo...

"Excellent" poetry and prose about physicians and their patients, by Raymond Carver, Kay Redfield Jamison, Rachel Naomi Remen, and more ( Library Journal).A Life in Medicine collects stories, poems, and essays by and for those in the healing profession, who are struggling to keep up with the science while staying true to the humanitarian goals at the heart of their work. Organized around the central themes of altruism, knowledge, skill, and duty, ...

A classic Lorrie Moore story from her beloved collection Like Life, “Vissi d’Arte” is funny, bright, a little sad, biting: a brokenhearted love song to art and New York City.Harry is a playwright who lives in Times Square. His bathroom floods; his surgeon girlfriend has left for the Upper West Side; and trucks have started idling outside his window at nighttime, where the hookers had always been. He is the type of man who lives for art, and someday his majestic, monumental...