Birds of America: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

This book floored me with its grounding of the ordinary into the magnificence. To be more precise, Moore imbues her generally ordinary characters and her generally ordinary plots with a number of startling/deeply tragic/tear- and guffawing-inducing hilarity/mind-numbing banality/horribly unjust betrayals/breathtaking settings/profound drama/twisted melodrama/deep, soul-affirming love/frightening violence. All of the above is seamlessly woven into an American life's every day fabric. This is a masterpiece; it's also a hell of a ridiculously fun, engrossing, supremely interesting and phenomenal read. Enjoy!

Sharply written stories with a slightly bleak edge. A good, stimulating read with interesting insights, a welcome difference from conventional short stories.

Lorrie Moore is a brilliantly witty writer, but I wouldn't advise anyone to read this book hoping to be cheered up by a few good laughs. You should be warned that children in this collection suffer from Wilm's tumor, cystic fibrosis, Down's syndrome, fatal head injury and death from polio. The adults don't fare much better. It is very brave of Moore to deal with such tragedies, and I suppose one of the duties of a great writer is to show how such things are dealt with, but I think her greatest strength is when she shows people dealing with less obvious afflictions. I still think she was at her best in "Self-Help" when she grabbed attention with the second-person and present tense She hammers home her points sometimes with convoluted sentences telling the reader what to think. Describing a woman with lung cancer who moves she says: "Every house is a grave, thought Ruth. All that life-stealing fuss and preparation. Which made moving from house to house a resurrection- or an exodus of ghouls depending on your point of view- and made moving to a house (yet another house!) the darkest of follies and desires?" Alice Munro, William Trevor, Katherine Mansfield, Carver, Cheever or Updike would have let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.

This book is funny and beautifully written. But the print run scrimped on the paper size and the print weirdly fills so much of the pages, you can't even see the page numbers. If I had known it would be like this I would have paid a bit more and gotten a used hardback.

Although this book cost me more than a used one, I'm thrilled with its brand new look. Lorrie Moore tends to write the same kind of story again and again, but with different characters, so if you are okay with that, you'll like this book. Each story has parallel themes in which the main character, a woman, is in distress, and nothing seems to help, and the story ends with her in distress. I'm not exactly sure why, but this didn't bother me! She's an excellent writer-- I'm just telling you what you're getting into.

Although this was not my favorite by Lorrie Moore, I am never not impressed by her. This was a gem, and it grew on me as I continued to read this.

The best stories here are about talented, witty, sarcastic people (women mostly) who, lacking any hope or confidence, compromise their integrity to be in relationships with cliche-ridden mediocrities, bores, sociopaths, cheaters, phony ideologues, and other loathsome creatures. The result is a collection of stories that is both comic and sad. These characters seem rather nihilistic in their lack of free-will and the abyss of despair and acedia that they've succumbed to. Lorrie Moore is at the top of the literary food chain when it comes to writing these kind of short stories. There are imitators who try to be cool with their nihilistic, cynical stories, but Lorrie Moore is the genuine article.

This is a poet with a deeply felt interest in how human beings treat one another. Her verse is fraught with poignant images revealing the way people hurt one another and often remain indifferent about do so. It is a shocking and alarming world depicted in her powerful pieces and one we must all be mindful of if we are to reach a better plain of existence.