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here for the first time in a beautiful hardback edition is the complete stories along with three new and previously unpublished in book form: Pape...

'A triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination.' Guardian'Strange and hilarious and so, so sharp.' Monica Heisey'When a book reaches out and speaks to a reader so clearly, one can hardly do anything but recommend it in the highest terms.' SpectatorA New Statesman, New Yorker and Financial Times Book of the Year.From one of the most celebrated imaginations i...

In these eight masterful stories, Lorrie Moore, explores the passage of time, and summons up its inevitable sorrows and comic pitfalls.In 'Debarking', a newly divorced man tries to keep his wits about him as the US prepares to invade Iraq. In 'Foes', a political argument goes grotesquely awry as the events of 9/11 unexpectedly manifest at a fundraising dinner in Georgetown. In 'The Juniper Tree', a teacher, visited by the ghost of her recently deceased friend, is forced to sing 'Th...

'You can sit back and have the time of your life reading A Gate at the Stairs.' Observer'The most irresistible contemporary American writer.' New York Times Book Review'One of the funniest writers alive' Dave Eggers'Hilarious and distressing, entertaining and wise' Roddy Doyle'Moore's a writer you don't quit.' GuardianWith America quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Kel...

'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

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 fro...

"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, ...

'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...

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...

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.

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...

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...