Bark: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

A Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize Finalist

"Uncanny. . . . Moving. . . . A powerful collection." --The Washington Post

"Moore's one of the country's most admired writers. . . . [Bark] shows off a true advance of Moore's powers and offers some first-rate reading pleasure." --NPR

"[Bark is] a book to which people will refer back to understand life as we lived it in the past ten years." --Salon

"Her stories, her stories, are perfect." --Slate

"Here is why one reads Moore: the terse, true polish of her emotional wisdom." --The Boston Globe

"Probably no writer since Nabokov has been as language-obsessed as Moore. . . . [Bark] lets us contemplate and savor just what makes her work unique." --The New York Times Book Review (cover)

"Irresistible." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"100% brilliant, as usual. . . . Moore has come to enjoy the unusual distinction of being just about the darkest light writer around. Unhappiness, heartbreak, illness, grief, disappointment--who'd have thought they could be so much fun?" --Geoff Dyer, The Observer (London)

"Extraordinary. . . . Moore's construction of a sentence, a paragraph, a page, is rarely less than exhilarating. . . . There is a moral nobility to Moore's assertion that even the least brilliant of lives deserve to be brilliantly documented. . . . Moore does not make us feel better; she hurts us. But she hurts us in vital, generous ways, and it is testament to the brilliance of her writing that we let her." --The Times Literary Supplement (London)

"If you adore Lorrie Moore, as so many of us do, you'll find much to enjoy in her new collection. . . . All the sparkly balls are in play--puns, politics, pop culture details, sometimes all at once." --Newsday

"If you had to criticize one thing about Lorrie Moore--and I don't know why you would, because she's awesome--it might be that her humor and her world-weary sense of the absurd are almost too distinctive. . . . But I don't have the heart to really complain about any of this: I've been addicted to Moore's voice for a long time now and want more, not less, of it." --Entertainment Weekly

"Laugh-out-loud funny. . . . Reading the stories one after another is a reminder of her uncanny ability to sum up, in a sentence or two, the truths that might take a lifetime to grasp." --Houston Chronicle

"Lorrie Moore's writing is strange and wonderful. It should be among anyone's top reasons for being alive." --PopMatters

"A vital work of literature." --Electric Literature