Lorrie Moore

America's first lady of darkness and mirth. – Guardian The best American writer of her generation. – Nick Hornby Unmissable. – Marie Claire From one of the most celebrated imaginations in American literature, Lorrie Moore's new novel, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, is a magic box of longing and surprise. High up in a New York...

Since the publication of Self-Help, her first collection of stories, Lorrie Moore has been hailed as one of the greatest and most influential voices in American fiction. Her ferociously funny, soulful stories tell of the gulf between men and women, the loneliness of the broken-hearted and the yearned-for, impossible intimacies we crave. Gathered here for the first time in paperback...

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? follows the lives of two 11-year-olds intent on escaping childhood. As the strength of their friendship is tested repeatedly, they begin to take their first, exhilarating steps towards adulthood.

Finn is in the grip of middle-age and on an enforced break from work: it might be that he's too emotional to teach history now. He is living in an America hurtling headlong into hysteria, after all. High up in a New York City hospice, he sits with his beloved brother Max, who is slipping from one world into the...

'When in 1999 I began writing for The New York Review of Books ... my stance became that of the ingenuous Martian who had just landed on a gorgeous alien planet ... Montaigne's que sais-je. A little light, a little wonder, some scepticism, some awe, some squinting, some je ne sais quoi. Pick a thing up, study it, shake it,...

Adrienne is living in a puritanical age, when the best compliment a childless woman can get is: You'd make a terrific mother. That's when she goes to her friends' Labour Day picnic and accidentally kills their baby. The shock of this scene is expertly packed into two brief paragraphs. What follows is Adrienne's retreat from life and her attempt to...

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 Like Life's eight exquisite stories, Lorrie Moore's characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can't quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop...