Lorrie Moore - Birds of America: Stories

A nest of tales that captures the eternal, hummingbird flutter of the human heart. A volume in which everything comes together: the authors mordant Dorothy Parker wit, the Joycean epiphanies, the Flannery OConnoresque moments of clarity and grace.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

These new stories sparkle; they are keenly and poignantly mindful of the idioms, banalities and canards of contemporary American society, and they hum with Moores earmark droll and incisive banter, her astonishing ability to render the intricacy of character in a few sharply focused details.

Houston Chronicle

Cements [Moores] reputation as one of our finest writers of fiction.

Austin American-Statesman

Lorrie Moore has made laughingstocks of all of us. And were devotedly, blissfully grateful. Moore packs more rambunctious American humor and worldly-wide melancholy into a story than many lesser writers can into an entire novel.

Newsday

[Moore] uses language to create a kind of carbonated prose: sentences with pop and fizz, with an effervescence of imagination that continually surprises.

The Dallas Morning News

Bats, flamingos, crows, performing ducks and bird feeders crop up in every story, but the real subject is human nature and the myriad ways Moores characters flock together or fly apart in the face of change, stasis or grief. Gorgeous. Rarely has a writer achieved such consistency, humor and compassion.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[Moores] dialogue snaps with fun. One could be trapped in an elevator with people like Moores men, or especially her women, and feel the luckier for it.

San Francisco Chronicle

Remains one of the best volumes of stories that any American has published in recent decades.

Bookforum

I hesitate to lay the adjective wise on one of [Moores] age. But watching a writer move into full maturity is always exciting. Flappy-winged take-off is fun; but the sight of an artist soaring lifts the heart.

Julian Barnes, The New York Review of Books

Written beautifully, flawlessly, carefully, with a trademark gift for the darkly comic and the perfectly observed. Thrilling.

Dave Eggers, Esquire

Moore peers into Americas loneliest perches, but her delicate touch turns absurdity into a warming vitality.

The New Yorker

Ive long been an admirer of Lorrie Moore; her Birds of America is an exquisite collection of stories by a writer at the peak of her form.

Geoff Dyer, The Independent

Moore is blessed with such astonishing, unbridled inventiveness she leaves the rest of us hamstrung mortals blinking in the dust. Moore writes like a force of nature.

The Seattle Times

Memorable and absorbing.

The Wall Street Journal

These stories are revelations of insight, the perception of the daily traumas of modern existence raised to ironic levels that tell us who we really are.

Richmond Times-Dispatch

Moore is the quintessential short-story writer. There is not a word wastedher every observation is burnished with humor and sadness.

Marie Claire

One of the most highly regarded collections of the 1990s.

The Times Literary Supplement (London)

Terrific.

Time Out New York

Exquisite. Come across these lines in the presence of another human being, and just try to resist reading them aloud.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

Brilliant.

Bookreporter

A fine collection. The reader will be forever susceptible to seeing absurdity everywhere.

Chicago Tribune

The sleight of hand that goes on within a Lorrie Moore story is one of supreme subtlety and wit. By turns laugh-out-loud funny and poignantly sad.

Detroit Free Press

One of the best short story collections of the 90s.

PopMatters

Fierce, heart-wrenching. One of the most remarkable short works published in recent decades, its unforgettable and great.

Philadelphia Tribune

Birds of America has the distinction of being one of the only flawless story collections from the twentieth century not written by John Updike.

The Stranger

Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collections Self-Help, Like Life, and Birds of America, and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Anagrams, and A Gate at the Stairs. 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.

ALSO BY LORRIE MOORE

Self-Help
Anagrams
Like Life
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
A Gate at the Stairs

FOR CHILDREN

The Forgotten Helper

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JANUARY 2010

Copyright 1998 by Lorrie Moore

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1998.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Eleven of these stories were originally published in slightly different form in the following:

Elle: Agnes of Iowa; Harpers: What You Want to Do Fine (originally titled Lucky Ducks); The New York Times: Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens (originally titled If Only Bert Were Here); The New Yorker: Beautiful Grade, Charades, Community Life, Dance in America, People Like That Are the Only People Here, Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People, and Willing; The Paris Review: Terrific Mother.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: Excerpt from Syrinx from A Silence Opens by Amy Clampitt, copyright 1993 by Amy Clampitt. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: Excerpt from The Meaning of Birds from Indistinguishable from the Darkness by Charlie Smith, copyright 1990 by Charlie Smith. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Moore, Lorrie.
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. United StatesSocial life and customs20th centuryFiction.
PS3565.O6225B57 1999
813.54dc21
98-6144

eISBN: 978-0-307-81688-7

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

This book is for my sister and for my parents
and for Benjamin