Birds of America: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

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 parlour games for the rest of your natural life. --James Marcus

"A nest of tales that captures the eternal, hummingbird flutter of the human heart. . . . A volume in which everything comes together: the author's mordant, Dorothy Parker wit, the Joycean epiphanies, the Flannery O'Connor-esque moments of clarity and grace." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"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." --Houston Chronicle

"Cements [Moore's] reputation as one of our finest writers of fiction." --Austin American-Statesman

"Lorrie Moore has made laughingstocks of all of us. And we're devotedly, blissfully grateful. . . . Moore . . . packs more rambunctious American humor and worldly-wide melancholy into a story than many lesser writers can into an entire novel." --Newsday

"[Moore] uses language to create a kind of carbonated prose: sentences with pop and fizz, with an effervescence of imagination that continually surprises." --The Dallas Morning News

"Bats, flamingos, crows, performing ducks and bird feeders crop up in every story, but the real subject is human nature and the myriad ways Moore's characters flock together or fly apart in the face of change, stasis or grief. . . . Gorgeous. . . . Rarely has a writer achieved such consistency, humor and compassion." --Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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

"Remains one of the . . . best volumes of stories that any American has published in recent decades." --Bookforum

"I hesitate to lay the adjective wise on one of [Moore's] age. But watching a writer move into full maturity is always exciting. Flappy-winged take-off is fun; but the sight of an artist soaring lifts the heart." --Julian Barnes, The New York Review of Books

"Written beautifully, flawlessly, carefully, with a trademark gift for the darkly comic and the perfectly observed. . . . Thrilling." --Esquire

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

"I've long been an admirer of Lorrie Moore; her Birds of America is an exquisite collection of stories by a writer at the peak of her form." --Geoff Dyer, The Independent

"Moore is blessed with such astonishing, unbridled inventiveness she leaves the rest of us hamstrung mortals blinking in the dust. . . . Moore writes like a force of nature." --Seattle Times

"Memorable and absorbing." --The Wall Street Journal

"These stories . . . are revelations of insight, the perception of the daily traumas of modern existence raised to ironic levels that tell us who we really are." --Richmond Times-Dispatch

"Moore is the quintessential short-story writer. There is not a word wasted--her every observation is burnished with humor and sadness." --Marie Claire

"Terrific." --Time Out New York

"Exquisite. . . . Come across these lines in the presence of another human being, and just try to resist reading them aloud." --San Diego Union-Tribune

"Brilliant." --Bookreporter

"A fine collection. . . . The reader will be forever susceptible to seeing absurdity everywhere." --Chicago Tribune

"The sleight of hand that goes on within a Lorrie Moore story is one of supreme subtlety and wit. . . . By turns laugh-out-loud funny and poignantly sad." --Detroit Free Press

"One of the best short story collections of the '90s." --PopMatters

"Firece, heart-wrenching. . . . One of the most remarkable short works published in recent decades, it's unforgettable and great." --Philadelphia Tribune