There’s a reason Lorrie Moore is so beloved by her baby boomer brethren: she’s smart, she’s funny, her eye is even sharper than her tongue. In Bark, her latest collection of stories, all those qualities are well on display. “He had never been involved with the mentally ill before,” she writes of her mid-life anti-hero in the (sort-of) title story, "Debarking." "[B]ut he now felt more than ever that there should be strong international laws against them being too good looking.” Acerbic? Check. K

First I'll just voice my irritation upon leaving the bookstore and learning I'd just shelled out $30 for a sub-200-page book. That's okay, though, it's got a nice Carol Devine Carson jacket and it's a new Lorrie Moore collection, so it's definitely worth the money. Until, of course, I discovered that the first four (of a total eight) stories had already been published in her Collected Stories collection, which I already own and have read. So in essence I've just paid $30 for half of a 200-page b...

Holy smokes, Lorrie Moore is brilliant and sharp and as cutting as broken glass! I do not like short stories, one bit, but darned if I didn't love these ones. In fact, I enjoyed the audio (narrated by Moore, herself) so much that I'm going to buy a hard copy to go back over and enjoy.This collection is about various characters in their middle age, with each having a date or spouse or significant other in the story with them. There is a sadness and disappointment in some of them, but not all, but...

Lorrie Moore has achieved short-story sainthood in books like Self-Help, Like Life and her 1998 masterpiece, Birds Of America. But even her greatest devotees will find her latest collection, her first in over 15 years, woefully uneven.Moore, with her poet’s eye and playful use of language, has always been able to find a savage, dark humour in pain and heartbreak. And there are glimpses of that in these eight stories, in which people, in the shadow of 9/11, confront divorce, illness and death wit...

I received an uncorrected ARC as a First Reads giveaway.Torn. I think it's more like 3.5 stars, but the writing is so spectacular in places it's well worth the read. Moore is the mistress of black humor. I laughed out loud. I dogeared half the book, and I even think I might need to change a story of mine because she already wrote it. (Good thing I read this book; what if I hadn't?) The issue is that a lot of the stories feel more like vehicles for great lines and sharp observations than like sto...

The cover of the issue in which the book's title story, "Debarking," first appeared: A while ago I read a review of Lorrie Moore's Bark that intrigued me: There was something about her short stories being populated with extraterrestrials. I must have thought there would be a touch of sci-fi. Maybe there is, but not in the sense that I was thinking. Some of the characters are almost reptilian, with other characters caught in their clutches. The word "extraterrestrial" actually is used twice. W

When I want to remind myself how to write, I turn to Lorrie Moore.

Lorrie Moore has such a knack with the short story. She nails the situation in the first sentence, and goes from there. Some of the stories seem too abrupt in closure, but reveals another side of today's world from the norm. Characters are painted in broad strokes, jump off the page early and keep going. There are moments that cause a bark of laughter (for me, that's the reason for the title, even if she didn't intend it to be so). As with any collection, some stories stayed with me longer than

Did something bad happen to Lorrie Moore? I don't need to read things that are uplifting. I am not set on having characters that are likable. But this collection was so dark, it left me feeling kind of horrible. This is a collection of stories that looked into the crawl space to find what was rotting there (figuratively, and in one story in this book, literally. I might suggest that if you read this collection, you should consider skipping the half-page after the flashlight is presented and the

I think I'm hopelessly in love with Lorrie Moore.

When I was studying for my MFA in Creative Writing (which is longer ago than I want to remember), Lorrie Moore was the golden goddess whose prose and sensibility almost every fiction grad student wanted to emulate. We prostrated ourselves before her devastating humor, her effortless wordplay, her skewering of every late 20th-century pretension. Once when I met her at a reading, I think I freaked her out by being too adoring. Most writers would have been thrilled, but Moore is not most writers. A...

This is a super short book of short stories, that felt more than anything like a hard drive dump. It's like the publisher said "How many have you got?" and Moore said "8 or so, but some of them are pretty old" and the publisher said, "I can work with that, send them over" and thus we have a book. That's not to say there aren't nuggets of pure Moore brilliance in this book. There are many. She's a great writer and she can hit the nail squarely on the head! How could someone have come so close to

From what I’ve heard from other critics (e.g. Philip Hensher’s somewhat harsh Guardian review), this really wasn’t the best place for me to be introduced to Moore’s short stories. My only prior experience with Moore’s writing was one story in an anthology about libraries (In the Stacks) and the decent novel A Gate at the Stairs – probably her least representative book. I enjoyed the collection well enough, but some of the stories did feel rather thin, and also a bit dated – predicting Obama’s el...

I recently read a quote by Stephen King on the art of writing the short story. From memory it went something like this..."short stories are harder to write than a novel. You have to take the direct route, no side streets, no stopping to chat." And he is right.I am ambivalent about these stories, a few seemed to me to have little or no point to them. Others I enjoyed immensely.Broadly these stories are about human relationships and idiosyncrasies. How the things we love in a person can, over time...

Total inspiration! I barely could get through this short collection of amazing short stories because I kept putting down the book and picking up a pen to write! What a dummy I was—I read these stories when I went to bed, and I ended up pulling several all-nighters. I’m too old for this! But I’m a pathetic amateur; I would kill to be able to write like her. She makes me listen hard and play hard. Every sentence is unique and precise, lovely and wild. And the way she plays with words; she’s an acr...

A wonderful grouping of eight short stories, the first by this author in many years. I liked all of them, I really do not have a favorite, don't think that has happened before. They are all such a mixture of social and political commentary, many with laugh out loud moments and others with pithy witticisms. She does a masterful job exposing the flaws in her characters and doing it in such a way that they find acceptance, oddities and all.The strange becomes the reality or the norm.Brilliant colle...

I can't decide what I think of this. I may give it another star tomorrow, in a year, a decade. I loved the structure and the unexpected, unresolved endings to so many of these. Other times, though, I felt like the characters were quite thin, or that whole interactions were merely set-ups for a particular joke. Moore suffers from having an army of copycats, so that her unique voice sounds weirdly stale at times; it's too often imitated, which of course is not her fault. There is a bitterness to t...

I really did not like this story collection, but I had to go with 2 stars based on the quality of the writing, which is often brilliant. Once again, I have finished reading Lorrie Moore and wondered why her work does not appeal to me at all. Instead of feeling engaged and satisfied and moved, I feel like I've just gotten off a roller coaster. I went for a crazy ride, zig-zagged and looped, but in the end I got nowhere and have a slight headache."Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It...

Married for two decades of precious, precious life, she and Rafe seemed currently to be partners only in anger and dislike, their old lusty love mutated to rage. It was both the shame and the demise of them that hate like love could not live on air. And so in this, their newly successful project together, they were complicitous and synergistic. They were nurturing, homeopathic, and enabling. They spawned and raised their hate together, cardiovascularly, spiritually, organically. In tandem, as a

keywords: the attractive ones are always crazy; more truth than they bargained for; the real, true history of the McDonald's House hostess; Hell's Angels at the wedding; you can visit me after I'm dead