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A long-awaited collection of stories--twelve in all--by one of the most exciting writers at work today, the acclaimed author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Self-Help. Stories remarkable in their range, emotional force, and dark laughter...
Picador
September 1999
304 pages
ISBN: 0312241224
Trade Size (reprint)
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Contemporary
From the opening story, "Willing"--about a second-
rate movie actress in her thirties who has moved back to
Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and
becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea
of who she is as a human being--Birds of America unfolds a
startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged,
the lost, the unsettled of our America.
In the story "Which Is More Than I Can Say About
Some People" ("There is nothing as complex in the world--no
flower or stone--as a single hello from a human being"), a
woman newly separated from her husband is on a long-planned
trip through Ireland with her mother. When they set out on
an expedition to kiss the Blarney Stone, the image of
wisdom and success that her mother has always put forth
slips away to reveal the panicky woman she really is.
In "Charades," a family game at Christmas is
transformed into a hilarious and insightful (and
fundamentally upsetting) revelation of crumbling family
ties.
In "Community Life,"a shy, almost reclusive,
librarian, Transylvania-born and Vermont-bred, moves in
with her boyfriend, the local anarchist in a small
university town, and all hell breaks loose. And in "Four
Calling Birds, Three French Hens," a woman who goes through
the stages of grief as she mourns the death of her cat
(Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Häagen Dazs, Rage) is seen by
her friends as really mourning other issues: the impending
death of her parents, the son she never had, Bosnia.
In what may be her most stunning book yet, Lorrie
Moore explores the personal and the universal, the
idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and
verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of
our time.
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