Bark: 'Pretty much 100% brilliant.' The Times - Hardcover

Moore, Lorrie

3.6

8,791 ratings by Goodreads

9780571273904: Bark: 'Pretty much 100% brilliant.' The Times

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571273904 ISBN 13: 9780571273904

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2014

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A literary moment and celebration - a new collection by one of America's most beloved and admired short story writers; her first in fifteen years, since Birds of America

In these eight masterful stories, Lorrie Moore, explores the passage of time, and summons up its inevitable sorrows and comic pitfalls.

In 'Debarking', a newly divorced man tries to keep his wits about him as the US prepares to invade Iraq. In 'Foes', a political argument goes grotesquely awry as the events of 9/11 unexpectedly manifest at a fundraising dinner in Georgetown. In 'The Juniper Tree', a teacher, visited by the ghost of her recently deceased friend, is forced to sing 'The Star Spangled Banner' in a kind of nightmare reunion. And in 'Wings', we watch the unraveling of two once-hopeful musicians, who neither held fast to their dreams, nor struck out along other paths.

Gimlet-eyed social observation, the public and private absurdities of American life, dramatic irony, and enduring half-cracked love wend their way through each of these narratives, in Moore's characteristic style that is always tender, never sentimental and often heartbreakingly funny.

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Review:

Moore is one of the world's great artists of the short story ... Perfection. Author: Kate Saunders Source: The Times

'[Moore's] first collection in 16 years, was a masterclass in the form.' Source: Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

[P]retty much 100% brilliant. Author: Geoff Dyer Source: The Observer

Bark is a collection of taut, coherent, breathtaking enchantments which - looked at individually and taken together - remind us how only fiction has the real ability to re-create the world, to slant the light and make us see ourselves, and everything around us, as if for the very first time ... Reading these stories is an intense, disquieting, exhilarating experience ... Find a straight half-hour. Find an hour, or even two. You will be richly rewarded. Author: Erica Wagner Source: Financial Times

At her best, she is brilliant - precise and evocative, running from the cute to the vicious in the space of a sentence. Author: Theo Tait Source: Sunday Times

Moore's writing glides. She describes the mundane with precision and grace ... Bark simultaneously honours and regrets the messiness of human relationships. Source: The Economist

No admirer of Moore's will go away either overloaded or unsatisfied, and it lets us contemplate and savor just what makes her work unique ... Probably no writer since Nabokov has been as language-obsessed as Moore, but while Nabokov saw himself as an enchanter ... Moore is a darker spirit, skeptical of language even as she makes it do tricks ... Beckett, among others, got there before her, but she may be the chief contemporary chronicler of those whose dread makes them unable to turn off the laugh machine. Author: David Gates Source: New York Times Book Review

[S]he is a forensically brave writer, acutely attuned to life's randomness, with a semantic virtuosity rarely equalled. Author: Catherine Taylor Source: Telegraph

Moore's construction of a sentence, a paragraph, a page, is never less than exhilarating ... 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. Author: Sam Byers Source: Times Literary Supplement

Plenty of superb comic touches. Source: James Kidd, Independent

Book Description:

Bark by Lorrie Moore is a literary moment and celebration - a new collection by one of America's most beloved and admired short story writers; her first in fifteen years, since Birds of America.

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