Books by Lorrie Moore

A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post Notable Book
A Best Book of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Financial Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, BookPage

“Heartbreaking. . . . Mordantly funny. . . . Takes us on a rare flight of self-transcendence. . . . Moments of recognition bring jolts like electric shocks.” —The New York Review of Books
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“Wonderful. . . . Masterful. . . . Profound. . . . Not a single false note.” —USA Today

“[Moore] deftly paints with negative space, releasing tremendous poignancy. . . . A vibrant and nimble display of Moore’s signature wit.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Ms Moore’s writing glides. She describes the mundane with precision and grace. . . .� Bark simultaneously honours and regrets the messiness of human relationships. Ms Moore is like one of her characters: ‘sternness in one eye and gentleness in the other.’” —The Economist

“One of the finest short story writers in the country.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“[Moore’s] writing contains multitudes, mixed in exacting proportions, which is to say: this potpourri is utterly and totally unique. . . . There really is no one quite like her.” —The New Republic
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“Lorrie Moore still dazzles. . . . These powerfully, almost savagely, human stories shine with a spirit of playfulness and the logic of love.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

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.

"When writers of fiction have made the effort to explore the mottled landscape of a child's secrets and understanding, they have often created stories of ferocious poignancy," Lorrie Moore writes in her Introduction to this exceptional collection of stories, in which the contradictions and hypocrisies of the adult world are seen through the eyes of children. In this collection of tales by some of today's best writers, including Margaret Atwood, Toni Cade Bambara, Charles Baxter, Spalding Gray, Susan Minot, and Alice Munro, each story is told by a child character or by the adult who was that child, skillfully preserving the child's voice and role as both an actor and a witness in the drama.

Chosen by the acclaimed writer Lorrie Moore for their insight and literary brilliance, these stories range across age, gender, class, ethnicity, and geography. They will resonate with readers as they convey not only individual stories of heartache and joy but also universal themes of growing up and coming to see, if not understand, the world in a new and different way.