Bark: Stories

Praise for Lorrie Moore’s
 
BARK
 
“When Moore opens her sentences out, as she is able to do whenever the rhythm or emotional pitch of a tale demands it, one realizes just how much she is able to encompass, and how tenderly she renders the passage of time. A single Moore sentence can span lives...Even as Moore tells us precisely what we don’t want to hear, she does so in a voice we can’t stop listening to. Moore does not make us feel better; she hurts us. But she hurts us in vital, generous ways, and it is testament to the brilliance of her writing that we let her.”
 
                                                -Sam Byers, Times Literary Supplement

"Reading the luminous stories in Lorrie Moore's collection is like spending another insanely perfect afternoon with your smartest, most acerbic, tough-minded but loving and loyal friend.  Moore is that necessary writer who brilliantly observes the dead-on sorrow and hilarity of our day-to-day.  But she's not out to glibly poke fun (though you'll laugh out loud and urgently read sentences to friends) or to glorify gloom; instead, in each of these eight stories, her characters—flawed, middle-aged, divorced, divorcing—are loath to entirely give up.”
 
--Victoria Redel, MORE magazine

“[A] powerful collection about the difficulty of letting love go.”
 
                                                -Heller McAlpin, Washington Post
 
“Moore is not only a brilliant noticer.  She is also brilliant at noticing those things that ‘one was supposed not to notice,’ namely our seemingly limitless cruelty, apathy, and violence...The initial surprise of Moore’s effervescent, jarring stories ultimately yields to a response that, far from mystification, is its mirror opposite: enlightenment.”
 
                                                -Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic
 
“Melancholy and funny...Lorrie Moore is real.  Her stories are poignant, and they tackle the things you try not to think about, but with real lightness, so the realness isn’t abjectly depressing.”
 
                                                -GQ Magazine
 
“Short fiction master Lorrie Moore’s new volume of stories  registers a dark, quirky take on the new-millennial zeitgeist...Moore’s unsparing insights, coupled with her laserlike wit, beam through in ways that surprise, shock, sadden, and cajole on every page...Moore’s wacky, lovable, light-seeking characters move like skittish deer from the safety of the woods to open fields where dangers lurk but life’s saving wonders also reside:  a silly joke, a good book, a glass of wine, a favorite song, a shared meal, a sudden kiss.”
 
                                                -Lisa Shea, Elle
 
“After all these years, Lorrie Moore still dazzles...For all their genuine sadness and existential angst, these powerfully, almost savagely, human stories shine with a spirit of playfulness and the logic of love...Moore interweaves public failures with individual, private ones to create a seamless tragicomic fabric and reminds us that laughing is sometimes like choking, which is a lot like crying.”
 
                                                -Bonnie Jo Campbell, O: Oprah Magazine
 
“No admirer of Moore’s will go away either overloaded or unsatisfied, and the book lets us contemplate and savor just what makes her work unique...Moore didn’t invent the breed, but she may be the chief contemporary chronicler of those whose dread makes them unable to turn off the laugh machine.  It’s commonplace to call Moore ‘funny,’ but that’s not quite right.  P. G. Wodehouse is funny.  Moore is an anatomist of funny...In a world according to Moore—the ‘planet of the apings,’ as one character thinks of it—who could ask for more?”
 
                                                -David Gates, New York Times Book Review
 
“Gaunt, splendid...What an irresistible bunch of characters she conjures up...We still need Lorrie Moore to work hard at making us laugh, to remind us that we’re frauds, we’re all just acting. To unzip words for us and let their sounds and meanings and pun potentialities jingle out like coins.  To point out the silver linings...She never lies to us.  She never tells us the water’s fine.  She says, Dive in anyway, “swim among the dying” while you can.  Learn how to suffer in style.”
 
                                                            -Parul Seghal, Bookforum
 
“The short form is her true forte.  Her talent is best exhibited in the collection’s longest stories (each around 40 pages); her comfort with that length is indicated by her careful avoidance of overplotting, which, of course, dulls the effect of an expansive short story, and by not allowing the stories to seem like the outlines of novels that never got developed.”
 
                                                -Booklist (Starred Review)
 
“One of the best short story writers in America resumes her remarkable balancing act, with a  collection that is both hilarious and heartbreaking, sometimes in the same paragraph...In stories both dark and wry, Moore wields a scalpel with surgical precision.”
 
                                                -Kirkus (Starred Review)
 
“These stories are laugh-out-loud funny, as well as full of pithy commentary on contemporary life and politics.”
 
                                                -Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
 
“Moore once again brings her acute intelligence and wit to play....The language has a fizzy rhythm that will have the reader turning the pages.  Smart, funny, and overlaid with surprising metaphor...Highly recommended.”
 
                                                -Library Journal (Starred Review)