

Bark
Bark by Lorrie Moore is a literary moment and celebration – a new collection by one of America’s most beloved and admired short story writers; her first in fifteen years, since Birds of America.
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A literary moment and celebration – a new collection by one of America’s most beloved and admired short story writers; her first in fifteen years, since Birds of America
In these eight masterful stories, Lorrie Moore, explores the passage of time, and summons up its inevitable sorrows and comic pitfalls.
In ‘Debarking’, a newly divorced man tries to keep his wits about him as the US prepares to invade Iraq. In ‘Foes’, a political argument goes grotesquely awry as the events of 9/11 unexpectedly manifest at a fundraising dinner in Georgetown. In ‘The Juniper Tree’, a teacher, visited by the ghost of her recently deceased friend, is forced to sing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ in a kind of nightmare reunion. And in ‘Wings’, we watch the unraveling of two once-hopeful musicians, who neither held fast to their dreams, nor struck out along other paths.
Gimlet-eyed social observation, the public and private absurdities of American life, dramatic irony, and enduring half-cracked love wend their way through each of these narratives, in Moore’s characteristic style that is always tender, never sentimental and often heartbreakingly funny.
Moore is one of the world's great artists of the short story ... Perfection.
'[Moore's] first collection in 16 years, was a masterclass in the form.'
[P]retty much 100% brilliant.
Bark is a collection of taut, coherent, breathtaking enchantments which - looked at individually and taken together - remind us how only fiction has the real ability to re-create the world, to slant the light and make us see ourselves, and everything around us, as if for the very first time ... Reading these stories is an intense, disquieting, exhilarating experience ... Find a straight half-hour. Find an hour, or even two. You will be richly rewarded.
At her best, she is brilliant - precise and evocative, running from the cute to the vicious in the space of a sentence.
Moore's writing glides. She describes the mundane with precision and grace ... Bark simultaneously honours and regrets the messiness of human relationships.
Lorrie Moore, after serving for almost three decades as the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been named the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Moore has received numerous grants and awards, from among others: the Lannan Foundation, the National Books Critics Circle, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.…
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