Awards
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
New York Times Editor's Choice
Synopses & Reviews
Birds of America is a stunning collection of twelve stories by Lorrie Moore, one of our finest authors at work today. With her characteristic wit and piercing intelligence she unfolds a series of portraits of the lost and unsettled of America, and with a trademark humor that fuels each story with pathos and understanding.
Review
"Lorrie Moore has something that many writers of her generation don't have: She is truly odd . . . [But] Moore's stories don't leave us in the solitary confinement that oddity can create, the way Diane Arbus did in her photographs, or Flannery O'Connor in her stories. They are the dance halls and constellations in which eccentricity becomes uniqueness." Los Angeles Times
Review
"These are memorable and absorbing stories." The Wall Street Journal
Review
"Lorrie Moore's wonderful Birds of America should establish her as one of America's best short-story writers . . . These stories impart such terrifying truths." Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
"A fine collection...the reader will be forever susceptible to seeing absurdity everywhere." Rachel Hall, Chicago Tribune
Review
"Lorrie Moore's reputation as one of the country's most engaging writers of short fiction will be confirmed with this new collection...prose bristles with precisely observed detail; her insights are both sharp and complex...rant...ued with acid wit and humane insight." The Boston Book Review
Review
"The humor of Birds of America does more than make us laugh...[Moore] skirts around the emotions and decision which her tales hinge, and for that reason her characters' blind spots and realizations are all the more nuanced." The Village Voice
Review
"Lorrie Moore soars with Birds of America...A marvelous, fiercely funny book about great and tiny jolts of the heart, about the push and pull of relationships, about the way loved ones, slowly or suddenly, become unrecognizable . . . One of her generation's wittiest and shrewdest writers." Newsweek
Review
"Fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial, Moore's sentences hold, even startle...Birds of America, while often lighthearted and steadily hilarious, is a sublimely dark book...Her most potent work so far...[it] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"A marvelous collection, deeper than anything Moore has written and yet underscored by that trademark humor in the face of familiar awfulness. Her stories are tough, lean, funny, and metaphysical...Birds of America has about it a wild beauty that simply makes one feel more connected to life." The Boston Globe
Review
"One could be trapped in an elevator with people like Moore's men, or especially her women, and feel the luckier for it." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Moore peers into America's loneliest perches, but her delicate touch turns absurdity into a warming vitality." The New Yorker
Review
"At once sad, funny, lyrical and prickly, Birds of America attests to the deepening emotional chiaroscuro of her wise and beguiling work." The New York Times
Review
"Her depth of focus has increased, and with it her emotional seriousness...wise...[and] exciting." The New York Review of Books
Review
"Her richest work to date...These new stories sparkle; they are keenly and poignantly mindful of the idioms, banalities and canards of contemporary American society, and they hum with Moore's earmark droll and incisive banter, her astonishing ability to render the intricacy of character in a few sharply focused details." Houston Chronicle
About the Author
Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collections
Like Life and
Self-Help, and the novels
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and
Anagrams. Her work has appeared in
The New Yorker,
The Best American Short Stories, and
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Willing
Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People
Dance in America
Community Life
Agnes of lowa
Charades
Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens
Beautiful Grade
What You Want to Do Fine
Real Estate
People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk
Terrific Mother