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Birds of America

AUTHOR: Lorrie Moore
ISBN: 0312241224
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Editorial Review

Birds of America
- Book Review, by Lorrie Moore

Amazon.com
Lorrie Moore made her debut in 1985 with Self-Help, which proved that she could write about sadness, sex, and the single girl with as much tenderness--and with considerably more wit--than almost any of her contemporaries. She followed this story collection with another, Like Life, as well as two fine novels, Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Yet Moore's rapid-fire alternation of mirth and deep melancholy is so perfectly suited to the short form that readers will greet Birds of America with an audible sigh of relief--and delight. In "Willing," for example, a second-rate Hollywood starlet retreats into a first-rate depression, taking shelter in a Chicago-area Days Inn. The author's eye for the small comic detail is intact: her juice-bar-loving heroine initially drowns her sorrows in "places called I Love Juicy or Orange-U-Sweet." Yet Moore seldom satisfies herself with mere pop-cultural mockery. She's too interested in the small and large devastations of life, which her actress is experiencing in spades. "Walter leaned her against his parked car," Moore relates. "His mouth was slightly lopsided, paisley-shaped, his lips anneloid and full, and he kissed her hard. There was something numb and on hold in her. There were small dark pits of annihilation she discovered in her heart, in the loosening fist of it, and she threw herself into them, falling." Elsewhere, the author serves up a similar mixture of one-liners and contemporary grief, lamenting the death of a housecat in "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens" and the death of a marriage in "Which Is More Than I Can Say About That." And her hilarious account of a nuclear family undergoing a meltdown in "Charades" will make you want to avoid parlor games for the rest of your natural life. --James Marcus

From Publishers Weekly
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.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Moore has written remarkably varied stories about sadness, crisis, and death. A dysfunctional family plays charades. A woman mourns the death of her cat. Bill traces his melancholy back to the death of his favored sister. A straight man tries a gay relationship while contemplating the kidnap of his son. Particularly difficult and poignant are the stories about the deaths of children. The stories are well written, remarkable in their clarity, full of gut-wrenching description and dialog. Some have lighter moments, but this is not enough to save the book from being dark and depressing. There is only so much misery a reader can endure. Let's hope this artist's "blue period" is brief. Recommended in small doses.-?Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Watch HillCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, James McManus
Birds of America, especially its three final stories, will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability.

The Wall Street Journal, Gabriella Stern
...memorable, absorbing short stories...

The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
At once sad and funny, lyrical and prickly, Birds of America not only reaffirms Ms. Moore's virtuosic skills as a writer, but also attests to the deepening emotional chiaroscuro of her wise and beguiling work.

From Booklist
Moore's wit works its magic best in her short stories. Her novels, including Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), are tenderly ironic, but her stories are breathtakingly funny, acutely observant, and unexpectedly poignant. Take "Willing," for instance, a tale about Sidra, a self-described "minor movie star once nominated for a major award," who has left Hollywood to sulk in a Days Inn in Chicago. Very little happens. She visits her boring parents, refuses to let the maids in to clean, and has an affair with a thoroughly inappropriate man, but the Dorothy Parker^-like dialogue, Sidra's caustic self-analysis, and such evocative details as a plant "dried to a brown crunch" all coalesce into a richly empathic tale. Ardor and its absence often occupy Moore, and she is adept at cracking the code of difficult relationships. We're all strange birds, Moore--who reads like Ann Beattie's younger, midwestern sister--seems to be saying in these fresh, quirky, and honest stories, and that's fine, as long as you have a good heart. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
A fine new collection of 12 stories notable for their verbal wit and range of intellectual referencethe third such from the highly praised author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994) and Like Life (1990). Moore's most typical characters are women in retreat from disappointing relationships or in search of someone or thing to relieve their solitude. One example is the eponymous protagonist of ``Agnes of Iowa,'' an unhappily married night- school teacher whose longing ``to be a citizen of the globe!'' is not assuaged by her brief encounter with a visiting South African poet. Another is the ``minor movie star'' of ``Willing,'' whose involvement with an auto mechanic cant repair the unbridgeable distance she's put between herself and other people. Or, in a practically perfect little story (neatly titled ``Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens''), theres the housewife who mourns her dead cat, is chastened by her husband's understandable exasperation, yet is still gripped by ``the mystery of interspecies love. Moore writes knowingly about family members who tiptoe warily around the edges of loving one another (``Charades''), who discover vulnerability where they had previously seen only dispassionate strength (``Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People''), or who learn to live, say, with the possibility of a baby dying (``People Like That Are the Only People Here''). Though her characters are likeably tough-minded and funny (who wouldn't want to cry ``Fie!'' in a crowded theater where Forrest Gump is playing?), they invariably manifest a feeling that life is passing too quickly and that we haven't made all the necessary arrangements. Accordingly, her hip, jokey mode is less affecting than her wistful, how-the-hell-did-I-end-up-here one. In Moore's skillful hands, a new home owner pestered by squirrels in the attic and a modest woman subjected to a pelvic exam by a roomful of medical students are altogether credible contemporary Cassandras and Medeas. She's an original, and she's getting better with every book. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"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 potent work so far . . . [it] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability."--James McManus, The New York Times Book Review

"A marvelous collection, deeper than anything Moore has written and yet underscored by that trademark humor in the face of familiar awfulness. Her stories are tough, lean, funny, and metaphysical . . . Birds of America has about it a wild beauty that simply makes one feel more connected to life."--Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

"One could be trapped in an elevator with people like Moore's men, or especially her women, and feel the luckier for it."--Erika Milvy, San Francisco Chronicle

"Moore peers into America's loneliest perches, but her delicate touch turns absurdity into a warming vitality."--The New Yorker

"At once sad, funny, lyrical and prickly, Birds of America attests to the deepening emotional chiaroscuro of her wise and beguiling work."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Her depth of focus has increased, and with it her emotional seriousness . . . wise . . . [and] exciting."--Julian Barnes, The New York Review of Books

"Her richest work to date...These new stories sparkle; they are keenly and poignantly mindful of the idioms, banalities and canards of contemporary American society, and they hum with Moore's earmark droll and incisive banter, her astonishing ability to render the intricacy of character in a few sharply focused details."--Harvey Grossinger, Houston Chronicle

Review
"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 potent work so far . . . [it] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability."--James McManus, The New York Times Book Review

"A marvelous collection, deeper than anything Moore has written and yet underscored by that trademark humor in the face of familiar awfulness. Her stories are tough, lean, funny, and metaphysical . . . Birds of America has about it a wild beauty that simply makes one feel more connected to life."--Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

"One could be trapped in an elevator with people like Moore's men, or especially her women, and feel the luckier for it."--Erika Milvy, San Francisco Chronicle

"Moore peers into America's loneliest perches, but her delicate touch turns absurdity into a warming vitality."--The New Yorker

"At once sad, funny, lyrical and prickly, Birds of America attests to the deepening emotional chiaroscuro of her wise and beguiling work."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Her depth of focus has increased, and with it her emotional seriousness . . . wise . . . [and] exciting."--Julian Barnes, The New York Review of Books

"Her richest work to date...These new stories sparkle; they are keenly and poignantly mindful of the idioms, banalities and canards of contemporary American society, and they hum with Moore's earmark droll and incisive banter, her astonishing ability to render the intricacy of character in a few sharply focused details."--Harvey Grossinger, Houston Chronicle

Book Description
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Editors' Choice
A Pulishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

Birds of America is a stunning collection of twelve stories by Lorrie Moore, one of our finest authors at work today. With her characteristic wit and piercing intelligence she unfolds a series of portraits of the lost and unsettled of America, and with a trademark humor that fuels each story with pathos and understanding.

From the Publisher
"Lorrie Moore soars with Birds of America...a marvelous, fiercely funny book." --Jeff Giles, Newsweek "Fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial, Moore's sentences hold, even startle.... Her most potent work so far...[it] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability." --James McManus, The New York Times Book Review "A marvelous collection, deeper than anything Moore has written and yet underscored by that trademark humor in the face of familiar awfulness. Her stories are tough, lean, funny, and metaphysical.... Birds of America has about it a wild beauty that simply makes one feel more connected to life." --Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe "At once sad, funny, lyrical and prickly, Birds of America attests to the deepening emotional chiaroscuro of her wise and beguiling work." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

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Book Review

Birds of America
- Book Reviews, by Lorrie Moore

Birds of America

FROM OUR EDITORS

Lorrie Moore, Story by Story

I interview people. I just interviewed author Lorrie Moore. A few years ago, I interviewed Emmylou Harris. In that interview, we went over the singer's new record song by song. For this interview I decided to go over Lorrie Moore's new book, Birds of America, story by story.

"Oh?" she says, after I explain. "That's very interesting. I feel stories are very close to songs. They have the same urgency and intensity."

Not only are Moore's stories urgent and intense, but they're peppered with great "zingers" -- terrific verbal bits; like a character who says, "Marriage is the film school of the 90s." Or the ones referred to as "cube steak yuppies." I figure Moore has overheard these quips in a restaurant or at a mall, but she tells me that these particular ones are inventions. "I just imagine the sensibility of a character and then imagine them saying something like that." She does confess that she walks around with a notebook. "That's what writers are suppose to do. Do you carry one?"

"Yes," I say. "But I believe if something is important I'll remember it."

"You can get suckered into thinking that," she says. "Sometimes things seem to be on fire in front of you and you're thinking, 'Ah! I'll never forget that.' But you will." Pause. "You always will."

Always? Moore gives that dour pronouncement with such finality that I'm quiet for a good long moment. Then I begin interviewing her about each of Birds of America's 12 cuts -- er, stories....

"Willing"

The book's opening story is about a second-rate movie star who flees Hollywood to hide out in a motel in Chicago. "Have you done Hollywood?" I ask Moore.

"Done Hollywood?" she says.

"Gone out there."

"No," she answers. "It's not like I usually write about actresses. I imagined my way into that bit of midwestern exile." Have you ever holed up in a strange city in a strange motel? "No," she laughs. "Oh no. No. No. I've never done something that depressed. But it was easy for me to imagine it."

Note about Lorrie Moore's laugh: She laughs a lot, and her laugh is delightful. It's neither a giggle nor cackle. And she's not laughing for my benefit. Her laugh seems the call of a woman who is truly amused by existence.

"Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People"

"Have you ever taken a trip with your mother?" I ask.

She gives that laugh. I asked what I asked because this story is about an American mother who forces her adult daughter to kiss the Blarney Stone. "I did go to Ireland," Moore tells me. "But I did not go with my mother." Did you kiss the stone? "I did. It was pretty much that awful." What did your mother think about the story? "Anytime your parents see a father or mother character, they get very nervous," she says. "Now, my mother knows she never went to Ireland with me and she knows it's fiction, but the story makes her nervous." Then she adds, "And I wouldn't know what to think if I had a child who was a writer."

"Dance in America," "Community Life," and "Beautiful Grade"

The first title is a very good, very short story only peripherally about the subject of the title. The next is about a Transylvanian-born librarian coping with life in America. The last concerns divorce and how "the young were sent to earth to amuse the old." For these tales, Moore and I talk shop on the mechanics of being a short story writer. I've always found short stories harder to get published than novels. I assume Moore gets every one of her stories placed immediately.

"Oh, God no," she says.

"Do you still get -- " I say...

"Rejections?" she says. "Sure. Sure." I don't believe her! Surely she's lying.... "Not everybody likes everything that you do," she insists. "Maybe John Updike never gets rejections. I don't know."

Okay. Maybe she's telling the truth.

"Agnes of Iowa"

"What color is your hair?" is my next question.

"What color is my hair?" she repeats.

"Have you ever dyed it red?" Ah. Now she knows that I am referring to the Iowa woman in the story who dyes her hair red during a trip to New York City -- "her bright, new, and terrible hair" (and Moore means "terrible" like "Ivan the Terrible").

Moore reveals that her hair is brown. We then talk about Manhattan. It turns out that we both lived in Little Italy during the mid-1980s. She doesn't realize that she was subletting across the street from John Gotti's social club. "You undoubtedly made numerous walk-on appearances on FBI surveillance footage," I tell her.

She laughs.

"Charades"

This is a Christmas story about adults playing charades with their aging parents, pantomiming such things as "arachnophobia" ("the whole concept, rather than working syllable by syllable"), as well as famous people such as Robert Oppenheimer (after the mother falls on the floor pantomiming an explosion, her son mistakenly thinks she's depicting "dizziness" for "Dizzy Gillespie"). "I write about Christmas too much," Moore says. "Christmas is a kind of a muse for me. I don't know why. During the holidays things occur to me. Maybe it's because of the upheaval of traveling and meeting with families." (Another of Moore's Yuletide musings, entitled "Chop Suey Xmas," will be collected in the upcoming book of essays We Are What We Ate: 24 Memories of Food.)

"Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens"

This story concerns a woman's holiday-season trips to a shrink in an attempt to come to grips with the death of her cat. So I tell Moore about what has just happened up at Times Square -- a scaffold collapsed, and tenants had to flee a residential hotel. Now the police won't let them back up into their rooms to retrieve their pets. A number of cats, gerbils, and fish have been locked up for six days now.

"That's so mean," Moore says.

"I've made this moral judgment," I tell her. "I think the cats should be rescued."

"But forget about the gerbils and fish -- I agree."

"I don't know what St. Francis would say."

"He might say 'include the gerbils,'" Moore states. "But I think he would draw the line at the fish."

"What You Want to Do Fine"

I mispronounce the title to Moore as, "What You Want to Do IsFine."

"This is why Harper changed it to 'Lucky Ducks,'" she says. "What can you do? You either accept these things or yank your story. I told them the title of the book was going to be Birds of America."

Lucky Ducks, Birds of America -- jeez.

"In that caption where they mention my forthcoming book, they did not mention the title," she says.

"Real Estate"

In this 35-page story, the word "Ha!" is repeated 1,140 times over two complete pages. "That must have been fun to write," I say.

"I have to say, this kind of thing worried my editor at Knopf," Moore says. "She told me, 'As my mother used to say, it's your dress. You're going to have to wear it.'"

"People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk"

This is a hospital drama about a "Father" and "Mother" and their seriously ill "Baby."

"Did you name the mother character the Mother to distance yourself from the events you were describing?" I ask.

"I think the idea was that in this horrible drama, there were roles. There was 'the Baby.' And 'the Mother.' And 'the Doctor,'" she says. "I began to use the roles as important in themselves. The names didn't matter."

She then reveals that this was the only story she wrote in 1996, the result of an overpowering experience with her own child.

"Terrific Mother"

Ha! (Only once....) Nothing like a little self-effacing irony. This story begins: "Although she had been around them her whole life, it was when she reached 35 that holding babies seemed to make her nervous...." Ally McBeal shouldn't read this story -- especially the part where the protagonist's boyfriend asks her to marry him: "I'm going to marry you whether you like it or not...I'm going to marry you till you puke." This 40-page story about their screwy honeymoon in Italy says as much about modern marriage as a full-length novel.

My final question is, "Do you consider yourself a short story writer or a novelist or both?"

"I am asked this a lot," Moore says. "You'd think I'd have a pat answer by now." She's silent a moment, then says, "Obviously I've written more short stories than novels. If you've written 35 short stories, you sort of feel like you're a short story writer, and if you've only written two novels you may be making grandiose claims for yourself by calling yourself a novelist. I would like to be both. I'm working on a novel now. I'm at the very beginning of it." Then she adds, "But, as I began to say, I'm a short story writer. It's not something I will ever leave entirely."

Now let me, the interviewer, ask you, the reader, a question: Any of you FBI agents? If so, check the surveillance tapes you made of John Gotti back in the '80s. Look for the female pedestrian who keeps passing on the street holding a cube of laundry wrapped in brown paper from her favorite Russian laundry on Mulberry Street. Spot her? Good. That woman is Lorrie Moore. She's the best short story writer practicing her craft in America today, and Birds of America is her crowning achievement.

—David Bowman

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From the opening story, 'Willing' -- about a second-rate movie actress in her 30s 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 the story 'Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People' ('There is nothing as complex in the world -- no flower or stone -- as a single hello from a human being'), a woman newly separated from her husband is on a long-planned trip through Ireland with her mother. When they set out on an expedition to kiss the Blarney Stone, the image of wisdom and success that her mother has always put forth slips away to reveal the panicky woman she really is. In 'Charades,' a family game at Christmas is transformed into a hilarious and insightful (and fundamentally upsetting) revelation of crumbling family ties. In 'Community Life,' a shy, almost reclusive, librarian, Transylvania-born and Vermont-bred, moves in with her boyfriend, the local anarchist in a small university town, and all hell breaks loose. And in 'Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens,' a woman who goes through the stages of grief as she mourns the death of her cat (Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Haagen Dazs, Rage) is seen by her friends as really mourning other issues: the impending death of her parents, the son she never had, Bosnia.

FROM THE CRITICS

Dave Eggers

The dust jacket of the hardcover Birds of America, while well-designed, is printed on uncoated paper, without a protective finish to ward off smudges, fingerprints, etc. So just carrying the book around for one day will leave it looking weathered, beaten, defeated, frumpy. Which is apt, given that Lorrie Moore's characters are exactly that: weathered, beaten, defeated, frumpy.

Moore's stories are about these things: Longing Suffering People mistakenly dropping babies on their head in such a way that the baby dies Depression, or at least life's way of sort of stalling at middle age Depression, or at least life's way of sort of stalling during that period just before middle age Depression, or at least life's way of stalling at any age at all, really Marriages and affairs that are hopeless but serviceable, like a scratchy, Army-issue blanket Creature comforts in the face of unfaceable pathos Lives that would warrant suicide if the owner could find the inspiration Friends who make you laugh Easy puns At least one person per story with cancer Perhaps a child with cancer, too

Still, though, it's important to remember that Moore, while fascinated almost exclusively with broken people, is among the very funniest writers alive. She is known for this, and other writers are known for this, too, I guess, but there is perhaps no other writer who balances the two so precariously, so perfectly. She is God to her characters' Job, throwing at them every conceivable calamity or handicap. In exchange, they get the great lines. For instance, the middle-aged gay man (who is also blind) in "What You Want to Do Fine," burdened by thoughts of war -- this is set just before the Gulf War -- and mortality, goes on a road trip with his middle-aged, formerly straight-and-married lover, Mack, and nevertheless ends up attending an AIDS memorial and again and again driving through cemeteries. As a reward, at the St. Louis Arch, Moore allows them this exchange: "Describe the view to me," says Quilty when they get out at the top. Mack looks out through the windows. "Adequate," he says.

Before this, Moore has done the following: First there was Self-Help (short stories, all sad, all funny); then there was Anagrams (a novel, despairing, hopeless, hilarious); then Like Life (more stories, largely interchangeable with those in Self Help, small slices of unassuming tragicomedy). Then came a second novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? a coming-of-age story about two young girls, which was, like all of her work, carefully and often gorgeously written, but also sort of soft, and perhaps too wistful, and maybe not so rich in detail. It was not so funny. And it was not so mean.

But she is both funny and mean in Birds of America, her new collection of stories, 12 of them, and this is good. Here the extremes are more extreme. Here the wit is more savage and the compassion more breathtaking. And here the formal experiments are more daring, and more successful. In "Real Estate," a woman reflects on her husband's various mistresses: Of course, it had always been the spring that she discovered her husband's affairs. But the last one was years ago, and what did she care about all that now? There had been a parade of flings -- in the end, they'd made her laugh: Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

It goes on like that for two pages. Just the "Ha!"s, for two pages. The passage rounds out with this: "The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally."

Resigned, heartbreaking, all that. Even so, while Moore's characters are beaten and weathered, cuckolded and tired, even while, by the way, the woman who has accepted her husband's philandering also has cancer, these stories are, to the last, nothing if not affirming, nothing if not joyful. How?

That's unclear. But know this: That she achieves this balance again and again -- while stretching her wings stylistically and broadening her palette in this, far and away, her best book -- is itself affirming. And joyous. -- Salon

New Yorker

Moore peers into America's loneliest perches, but her delicate touch turns absurdity into a warming vitality.

James McManus - New York Times Book Review

It will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability. . .Fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial, Moore's sentences hold, even startle, us. . .Birds of America, while often light-hearted and steadily hilarious, is a sublimely dark book. . . .her most potent work so far.

Julian Barnes - New York Review of Books

Her depth of focus has increased, and with it her emotional seriousness. I hestiate to lay the adjective wise on one of her age. But watching a writer move into full maturity is always exciting. Flappy-winged take-off is fun; but the sign of an artist soaring lifts the heart.

Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

At once sad, funny, lyrical and prickly, Birds of America attests to the deepening emotional chiaroscuro of her wise and beguiling work. Read all 16 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Whenever Lorrie Moore publishes a new story there we are, her fans, at the ready, calling around, 'Have you read it yet? Can you believe what she did this time? Is there anyone like her?' Indeed, there are very few writers at work now who love words the way she does, very few who are as inventive and wild and careful, all at once, sentence by sentence. Add to these gifts her wisdom, her humor, her singular point of view. — Jane Hamilton

She is the best short story writer of my generation. — Bret Easton Ellis

"Lorrie Moore soars with Birds of America...a marvelous, fiercely funny book." --Jeff Giles, Newsweek

"Fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial, Moore's sentences hold, even startle.... Her most potent work so far...[it] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability." --James McManus, The New York Times Book Review

"A marvelous collection, deeper than anything Moore has written and yet underscored by that trademark humor in the face of familiar awfulness. Her stories are tough, lean, funny, and metaphysical.... Birds of America has about it a wild beauty that simply makes one feel more connected to life." --Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

"At once sad, funny, lyrical and prickly, Birds of America attests to the deepening emotional chiaroscuro of her wise and beguiling work." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times — St. Martin's Press

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