About the Author

Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collections "Like Life" and "Self-Help," and the novels "Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?" and "Anagrams." Her work has appeared in "The New Yorker," " The Best American Short Stories," and "Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards." She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Reviews

"Lorrie Moore has something that many writers of her generation don't have: She is truly odd . . . [But] Moore's stories don't leave us in the solitary confinement that oddity can create, the way Diane Arbus did in her photographs, or Flannery O'Connor in her stories. They are the dance halls and constellations in which eccentricity becomes uniqueness."--Susan Salter Reynolds, "Los Angeles Times"
"These are memorable and absorbing stories."--Gabriella Stern, "The Wall Street Journal"
"Lorrie Moore's wonderful "Birds of America" should establish her as one of America's best short-story writers . . . These stories impart such terrifying truths."--Susan Miron, "Philadelphia Inquirer"
"A fine collection . . . the reader will be forever susceptible to seeing absurdity everywhere."--Rachel Hall, "Chicago Tribune"
"Lorrie Moore's reputation as one of the country's most engaging writers of short fiction will be confirmed with this new collection . . . Her prose bristles with precisely observed detail; her insights are both sharp and complex . . . vibrant . . . imbued with acid wit and humane insight."--Elizabeth Shostak, "The Boston Book Review"
"The humor of "Birds of America" does more than make us laugh . . . [Moore] skirts around the emotions and decision which her tales hinge, and for that reason her characters' blind spots and realizations are all the more nuanced."--"The Village Voice" (25 Favorite Books of the Year)
"Lorrie Moore soars with "Birds of America" . . . A marvelous, fiercely funny book about great and tiny jolts of the heart, about the push and pull of relationships, about the way loved ones, slowly or suddenly, become unrecognizable . . . One of her generation's wittiest and shrewdest writers."--Jeff Giles, "Newsweek"
"Fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial, Moore's sentences hold, even startle . . . "Birds of America," while often lighthearted and steadily hilarious, is a sublimely dark book . . . Her most

Though the characters in these 12 stories are seen in such varied settings as Iowa, Ireland, Maryland, Louisiana and Italy, they are all afflicted with ennui, angst and aimlessness. They can't communicate or connect; they have no inner resources; they can't focus; they can't feel love. The beginning stories deal with women alienated from their own true natures but still living in the quotidian. Aileen in "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens," is unable to stop grieving over her dog's death, although she has a loving husband and daughter to console her. The collection's two male protagonists, a law professor in "Beautiful Grade" and a housepainter who lives with a blind man in "What You Want to Do Fine," are just as disaffected and lonely in domestic situations. The stories move on, however, to situations in which life itself is askew, where a tumor grows in a baby's body (the detached recitation of "People Like That Are The Only People Here" makes it even more harrowing ). In "Real Estate," a woman with cancer‘after having dealt with squirrels, bats, geese, crows and a hippie intruder in her new house‘kills a thief whose mind has run as amok as the cells in her body. Only a few stories conclude with tentative affirmation. "Terrific Mother," which begins with the tragedy of a child's death, moves to a redemptive ending. In every story, Moore empowers her characters with wit, allowing their thoughts and conversation to sparkle with wordplay, sarcastic banter and idioms used with startling originality. No matter how chaotic their lives, their minds still operate at quip speed; the emotional impact of their inner desolation is expressed in gallows humor. Moore's insights into the springs of human conduct, her ability to catch the moment that flips someone from eccentric to unmoored, endow her work with a heartbreaking resonance. Strange birds, these characters might be, but they are present everywhere. Editor, Victoria Wilson; agent, Melanie Jackson.(Sept.)