

Bark
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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Shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award
In these eight masterful stories, Lorrie Moore explores the passing of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and comic pitfalls. Gimlet-eyed social observation, the public and private absurdities of American life, irony and half-cracked love wend their way through these stories, in which Moore is always tender, never sentimental and often heartbreakingly funny.
Moore is one of the world's great artists of the short story ... Perfection.
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.
[P]retty much 100% brilliant.
At her best, she is brilliant - precise and evocative, running from the cute to the vicious in the space of a sentence.
No admirer of Moore's will go away either overloaded or unsatisfied, and it lets us contemplate and savor just what makes her work unique ... Probably no writer since Nabokov has been as language-obsessed as Moore, but while Nabokov saw himself as an enchanter ... Moore is a darker spirit, skeptical of language even as she makes it do tricks ... Beckett, among others, got there before her, but she may be the chief contemporary chronicler of those whose dread makes them unable to turn off the laugh machine.
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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